Josh Trank's biopic Capone focuses on the final year in the life of notorious gangster Al Capone, and while the dramatization features a number of fictional characters, several of the actors are playing real people from Capone's life. The man himself is played by Tom Hardy, sporting heavy makeup to depict a Capone who is deteriorating physically and mentally from neurosyphilis.
After being released from prison due to his failing health, Al Capone spent the end of his life living in his mansion in Palm Island, Florida, with his wife, Mae (played by Linda Cardinelli in the movie). Capone is told mostly from Capone's own fracturing perspective, as he experiences detailed hallucinations and is haunted by the violence in his past. Meanwhile, FBI agent Crawford (Jack Lowden) is convinced that Capone is faking his dementia, and is interested in tracking down $10 million that the mobster once squirrelled away.
Crawford isn't based on any specific real person, and Capone's estranged son Tony (Mason Guccione) is fictional. However, Capone does feature several members of Al Capone's family, his former partner Johnny Torrio, and other people who were present in his final days. Here's what the characters in Capone actually looked like in real life.
Tom Hardy as Al Capone
Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born in 1899 in New York City. In his youth, he cycled through a few different small-time gangs before joining the Five Points Gang. While Capone was working a night club door as a teenager, a man called Frank Galluccio slashed him three times on his face and neck with a pocket knife, leaving lifelong scars that earned Capone the hated nickname "Scarface." Surprisingly, Capone never took revenge on Galluccio, even after he became the leader of the Chicago Outfit. He actually apologized to Galluccio after the incident, which had broken out after Capone insulted Galluccio's sister.
Linda Cardinelli as Mae Capone
Mae Capone was born in Brooklyn in 1987 as Mary Josephine Coughlin, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She and Capone met in Brooklyn and Mae gave birth to their only son, Albert Francis "Sonny" Capone, in 1918, three weeks before she and Capone got married. At that time Capone had already been suffering silently with syphilis for several years, but while it's speculated that he may have passed the disease on to Mae, this detail is unconfirmed. Mae went on to outlive her husband by almost four decades, finally passing away in a nursing home in Florida in 1986. She never remarried after Capone's death in 1947.
Kyle McLachlan as Dr. Kenneth Phillips
Though Kyle McLachlan's character is called Dr. Karlock in Capone, he is based on Capone's real physician Dr. Kenneth Phillips, who treated him up until his death. Though the detail of Phillips spying on Capone for the FBI appears to be fictionalized, there's evidence to suggest that he was quite a shady character. In 1929, after Capone had been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury for his role in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Phillips signed an affidavit claiming that Capone was ill with pneumonia, that he'd been confined to his bed for six weeks, and that it would be dangerous for him to leave Florida and go to court in Chicago. The statement was blatantly false; though Capone had been ill, he had since recovered and been seen out and about at parties and other events.
Matt Dillon as Johnny Torrio
Johnny Torrio and Al Capone's relationship started in New York City when they were both members of the Five Points Gang. Torrio was 17 years older than Capone, who looked up to him as a mentor figure. After the previous leader of the Chicago Outfit was ambushed and killed (allegedly on Torrio and Capone's instructions), Torrio took over the leadership position until he himself was subjected to an attempted assassination by a rival gang in 1925, leading him to step down and leave Capone in charge. After being sent to prison for two years over tax evasion charges in 1939, Torrio lived out the rest of his life quietly and died in 1957, ten years after Capone himself passed away. In Capone, Johnny appears as a hallucination who ends up tormenting Capone by gouging out his own eyes.
Noel Fisher as Albert Francis "Sonny" Capone
Noel Fisher plays the only son of Al and Mae Capone: Albert Francis Capone, who was better known by his nickname "Sonny." Born in 1918, Sonny was a sickly child who became almost completely deaf in his left ear as a result of persistent infections. After Capone's death, Sonny ran a restaurant and continued to receive a stipend of hush money from the Chicago Outfit. Sonny's criminal career was considerably less illustrious than his father's; in 1965 he was charged with shoplifting two bottles of aspirin and a packet of batteries from a supermarket - a haul with a total value of $3.50. The story attracted so much media attention due to his family connection that Sonny ultimately ended up dropping the "Capone" from his name, changing it to simply Albert Francis.
Al Sapienza as Ralph Capone
Capone's older brother, Ralph Capone, earned the nickname "Bottles" when he ran the Chicago Outfit's legitimate business front of bottling plants for non-alcoholic beverages. He also handled the organization's bootlegging operations during Prohibition, and during the federal investigation into the Chicago Outfit was identified as a weak link. The IRS began pursuing Ralph for tax evasion and discovered that while he was pleading poverty to them, he was depositing enormous amounts of money from his bootlegging operations in accounts under various different aliases. Ralph committed a lot of financial fraud, but was hilariously bad at it; not only would he try to hide his money by closing an account and then immediately opening another account with the same amount of money under a different name, he also frequently made cash deposits in the exact sum of the cost of a barrel of beer in Chicago. He served three years for tax evasion in 1932, and died in 1974.