When Mark Wahlberg apologised to his co-stars for the wrong reason: “I wasn’t very engaging”
Is there a blander or more banal leading man in modern Hollywood than Mark Wahlberg? Looking at how the evidence continues to pile up to show that mediocrity has become his default setting, and that might even be generous, perhaps not.
Admittedly, there have been occasional hints of a half-decent actor, but they’ve been few and far between. For anyone who wants to play the Boogie Nights card, as good as the former Funky Bunch frontman was as Dirk Diggler in Paul Thomas Anderson’s classic, that was almost 30 years ago.
For anyone who wants to mention that he’s got an Academy Award nomination to his name for a scene-stealing turn in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, not only was that two decades ago, but playing a foul-mouthed and arrogant Boston native isn’t exactly too far outside of his wheelhouse.
He was good in The Fighter, too, but again, a Bostonian who loves to fight doesn’t make him Marlon Brando. It’s been a long time since Wahlberg was in a good movie, with a never-ending succession of tedious action thrillers, cloying family films, and the odd interminable comedy thrown in for good measure.
It’s made him rich, so he must be doing something right, but there’s something hilariously oblivious about the actor talking about his immersive approach like he was plunging the depths of his psyche to bring a complicated character to life, when in reality, he was playing a hammy villain with a baldy napper in Mel Gibson’s tiresome Flight Risk.
“I was locked into the part the whole time,” he told People. “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.” There are times to go method, but a glorified B-movie helmed by a Hollywood exile that inexplicably topped the box office in its opening weekend, despite being shite, sure isn’t it.
“I was like the guy who was constantly picking at them, poking them and prodding them, you know, from the back of the plane the entire time,” he continued, with Michelle Dockery and Topher Grace on the receiving end of his pointless method antics. “I apologised at the end because I wasn’t very engaging off-camera or outside of shooting, but I was just in that headspace.”
Maybe he’d have been better off apologising to his co-stars for taking such a ridiculous movie so seriously. Yes, it was the first time he’d played a villain in over a quarter of a century, but a chrome-domed assassin masquerading as a pilot with a full head of hair who spends 90-odd nonsensical minutes plotting to murder the only two people he’s got any scenes with isn’t Daniel Day-Lewis-level stuff.
Imagine making a film with Mel Gibson at the helm, only to spend every working moment of the 22-day shoot being terrorised by Mark Wahlberg all day, every day, after he decided to stay in character for the duration. That’s the stuff of nightmares, especially when Flight Risk was such a dud.
