Mark Wahlberg needed a lot of solo time on his latest movie set.
The 53-year-old star portrays a hit man pretending to be a pilot whose targets are U.S. Marshal Madelyn (Michelle Dockery) and fugitive Winston (Topher Grace) in the new thriller “Flight Risk.”
Wahlberg revealed he took a new approach to getting into character.
“I was locked into the part the whole time. So if we weren’t shooting, I was like either off in the corner by myself or I just would kind of go back to my little dressing room and just sit there,” he told People in an interview published on Friday.
The last time Wahlberg took on the on the villain role was in 1996’s “Fear,” opposite Reese Witherspoon.
“I was like the guy who was like constantly picking at them, poking them and prodding them, you know, from the back of the plane the whole entire time,” the star continued. “I apologized at the end because I wasn’t very engaging off camera or outside of shooting, but I was just in [that] head space. We only had 22 days of shooting.”
“So it wasn’t four months, five months of this. We shot it very quickly,” added Wahlberg.
The Oscar winner also reflected on where he drew his bad-guy inspiration from.
“I’ve been saying over and over how much I love movies like ‘The Shining’ with [Jack Nicholson] and ‘In The Line of Fire’ with [John Malkovich] and ‘Cape Fear’ with [Robert] De Niro. Those are the kind of characters that I always loved and gravitated towards, and I hadn’t done it in such a long time.”
Wahlberg noted, “I don’t know, I just kept all these ideas popping into my head about how I would play that particular role.”
“Flight Risk” is directed by Mel Gibson with the actors previously working together in “Father Stu” (2022), and 2017’s “Daddy’s Home 2.”
But this project will mark the first time Wahlberg is starring in a movie with Gibson, 69, on the other side of the camera.
In June, Wahlberg spoke to People about his decision to act in a movie directed by the “Boneyard” vet.
“He knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it, but he was also open to collaborating,” Wahlberg explained.
Gibson’s last directorial film, 2016’s “Hacksaw Ridge,” received two Academy Awards and several nominations.
“Again, to be shooting 15, 20 pages a day, something that I had never done before. I’ve shot down ‘n dirty, but, like 30 days was the fastest I’d ever done a film,” Wahlberg continued. “This was in 20 or 22 days.”
“Having seen ‘Apocalypto’ a million times and ‘Braveheart’ and every other film that he’s directed, he’s such a talented filmmaker,” he gushed. “It was one of those things where, between the part and to getting to work with the filmmaker, for me it’s always top of the list: the script, the director and the part are the three main components when making a choice.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
