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Marilyn Manson Was Born to Play a Hitman in This Thriller

At last: 'Let Me Make You a Martry' offers the perfect role for the God of Fuck.
Daisy Jones
London, GB

Uuugh, Marilyn Manson is probably a terrible person, but my God is he glorious. Cross-dressing style icon, creator of nine very loud albums and mischievous figurehead of all that is fucked up (according to the Christian right, anyway), the man can do no wrong because he's already done it.

All of which is to say, a couple of years back you may remember it being announced that Manson was going to appear in a new thriller called Let Me Make You a Martyr – written and directed by John Swab and Corey Asraf – in which he would play a native American gun-for-hire called Pope. Today a new trailer for that film has finally arrived and, well… it's extremely creepy and ominous – and therefore the perfect film role for the God of Fuck.

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In it, Manson drives in a car with another guy before turning to him and saying, "You ever killed a man with your bare hands? My daddy used to sing me a song…" He then slowly lifts a gun and points it at the guy while singing what sounds like a really fucked up lullaby that would definitely, definitely not help make me fall to sleep. For the man who was (bizarrely) blamed for 36 tragic high school shootings – including, most prominently, Columbine in 1999 – to be seen playing a gun-wielding hitman shows that, even now, he highkey gets kicks from inciting controversy.

Speaking to Rolling Stone about his decision to appear in the film, Manson said, "I just had to observe the level of poverty and, I guess, white trash element to the story," he says. "The house where my character lives, sort of on a swamp on a reservation, looked like a combination between Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Apocalypse Now. It was pretty epic. Just seeing that, I knew where to go."

He also said, "Within the first day, I was asked if I wanted to skin a coyote… It was already dead. And I was asked to burn down a house and 'kill' a bunch of people, so the answer was 'yes' obviously." Very nice.

This won't be his first film role, obviously. He's appeared in around 20 movies and TV shows, including David Lynch's Lost Highway and low budget cult classic Party Monster, in which he was a New York drag queen called Christina Superstar who spends the whole time off her face on acid and furiously driving a bus. In many ways, Manson's role in Let Me Make You A Martyr makes perfect sense for a guy that has spent over two decades making a career out of this weird-ass, magnetic persona that we can't get enough of; one in which he continuously holds up a mirror to pop culture, reflects it back to all of us and then sits back and laughs at his own private joke. The best part of his career trajectory has been the way he toys with where his public persona in all of its outrageousness ends, and his private personality – unknown to the rest of us – begins.

Let Me Make You A Martyr will be out 6 June on vid-on-demand, as well as in select cinemas later this month. In the meantime, you can read about the time we gave Marilyn Manson a pink stuffed unicorn and he gave us sex tips here.

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(Lead image by Patrick Whitaker via Wikimedia)