Jeremy Strong calls the ‘The Big Short’ a black comedy about financial crisis

Jeremy Strong likes to immerse himself in his work. To prep for his role as Vinnie in the new film “The Big Short,” opening Wednesday in the District, Mr. Strong read Michael Lewis’ book of the same name, a retelling of a combination of factors that led to the disastrous 2008 mortgage crisis.

Joining a stellar cast that includes Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale and Marisa Tomei, Mr. Strong portrays a member of Mr. Carell’s financial crew who are betting that mortgage-backed securities will collapse — thereby making tremendous sums of money in the process.

“I feel like my job is just to sort of empathically and viscerally find a way into these people,” Mr. Strong told The Washington Times of his character.

Mr. Strong has kept a busy schedule the past few years, appearing in “Lincoln,” “The Judge,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Selma” and this year’s “Black Mass” with Johnny Depp. While saying he wasn’t at first familiar with the book, he delved into it, finding it a true page-turner.

“I’m a real kind of research junkie,” Mr. Strong said. “It read like a Robert Ludlum thriller, and I really couldn’t put it down.

“And Michael Lewis is great at writing these sort of outlier underdogs in a sense, and their sort of personal struggles and what it was about these individuals that sort of made them view the same set of facts that everyone else had and view them differently — view them with skepticism or pessimism.”

“The Big Short” is directed by Adam McKay, primarily known for helming Will Ferrell comedies like “Talladega Nights” and the “Anchorman” films. While he may seem an odd choice for the material, Mr. Strong insists that Mr. McKay is “one of the deepest filmmakers I’ve ever worked with” and exhibited an intelligence and heart in realizing the story of America’s financial collapse.

At the same time, Mr. McKay’s penchant for laughs allowed for a certain levity on the set, Mr. Strong said.

“Adam is definitely the funniest guy you’ve ever met,” Mr. Strong said of his director. “He created an environment that was very free and had a sense of permissiveness and play so that we would shoot the text as written, and then … he would just encourage us to mess around with it and take chances. A lot of that ended up in the movie.”

Mr. McKay also said the experience of his fellow actors upped his own game in scenes with Mr. Carell and others.

“I think when you’re working with actors of this caliber, it encourages you to want to risk more … to put yourself on the line,” he said. “I’ve really admired all of these guys from a distance for some time, so it was really exciting to be working with them.”

Mr. Strong maintains the process increased his own realization of Vinnie, who faces some extremely tense circumstances.

“I thought of my character as [being in] a disaster movie,” Mr. Strong said. “He’s like a seismologist and he’s waiting for an earthquake. And there was a sense that something really bad was going to happen for me. And so you try, I think, to live in that place.”

Mr. Strong has faced the darkness in his work before. In 2012’s “Parkland” he played Lee Harvey Oswald, for which the thespian did much research — discovering something utterly surprising about John F. Kennedy’s assassin.

“The Saturday before the assassination, he [saw] a movie on TV with [Frank] Sinatra called ’Suddenly,’” Mr. Strong said of his learning more about the unsettled former Marine. “Sinatra plays this guy who goes to a small town, and there’s a room overlooking a train depot, and he sets up a sniper rifle, and he’s there to assassinate the president of the United Stated,” Mr. Strong said of the plot to the 1954 film.

“It’s all about this character, this man who is finally going to do something that will finally make people pay attention. And Oswald saw that movie [the week] before, and that kind of stunned me.

“I don’t exonerate him, but I think [Oswald] was a troubled guy, and I think desperate to do something special,” Mr. Strong said of the man who was himself shot and killed by Jack Ruby mere days after shooting the president in Dallas. “I do think that he believed he was doing something that would make him matter. And that was a really dark sort of place to try and understand and get behind.”

Mr. Strong counts himself lucky to have worked with such directors as Steven Spielberg and Kathryn Bigelow — and says the experience of making “The Big Short” has made him appreciate the craft of storytelling all the more.

“I was surprised by how much bigger in scope the film was than I thought it was going to be. I think this rarely every happens [where a film] sort of surpasses the book in terms of how personal Adam has made it,” Mr. Strong said. “I think it has its finger on the pulse of our country that I found very excited when I see it, and I hope that people feel the same way.”