Despite all the varied roles he has played over the years, Mark Wahlberg said he didn’t quite anticipate the challenges of meeting the physical and mental demands of his new movie Shooter. “You know, I knew going in it was going to be tough, but actually making the movie, the stuff was pretty rigorous,” he said in a conference call last month.
Wahlberg stars in the film as Bob Lee Swagger, an ex-Army sniper who is called back to service but soon finds himself the target of a manhunt.
Wahlberg explained why the training for the new film was extremely harsh. “I had fired other weapons in other movies obviously, but I had never done something as intense as sniper training,” he said. He added he had no previous sniper training, so he went to sniper school.
Wahlberg also said he performed most of his own stunt work. “I did everything Antoine (Fuqua, the director) asked me to do, which was pretty much all of it. You know, you certainly want the audience to feel like they’re really watching me go through all these things and not feel like they’re cutting away to a stuntman constantly.”
But Wahlberg stressed Swagger’s character is not that of a glorified sniper role. “There’s not much glamour involved in it at all. It takes a lot of discipline and they are as smart as they are tough,” he said. Wahlberg also spoke about how he identified with the character to a certain extent, in the sense that the character is skeptical of the world around him. “I think there’s a lot of misinformation being fed. But, you know, obviously the character that I play is extremely suspicious about everything that’s going on in the world.”
With so many action movies permeating the film landscape, it is sometimes hard to keep track of them all. Audiences may find it difficult to distinguish one from another, but Wahlberg said Shooter is not just another action flick. “The high-intensity action movies that (Hollywood’s) been making lately aren’t really the kind of character-driven movies that I love and that I grew up watching in the ’70s. (Shooter) is kind of a throw-back to that,” he said.
Wahlberg discussed other aspects of his career during the call. When asked about how his recent Oscar nomination for his role in The Departed has affected roles he will take, he said, “I certainly can’t just start looking for like English period dramas and stuff that’s going to get me nominated again.” He also said when he chooses roles, he bases his decision on what movies he thinks people would want to see him in.
But he also said he likes to mix it up and perform different roles: “David O. Russell, who wrote and directed Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, is actually writing a broad comedy for me right now. So, you know, we want to try to switch it up every time now.”
Wahlberg is also an executive producer of the hit HBO original series Entourage and discussed the differences between acting and producing. “I get a certain amount of personal satisfaction out of acting, honestly. But producing and enabling others to go out and do their thing has brought me great joy,” he said.
Directing may also be in the future for the actor.
“Antoine is somebody that I enjoyed working with so much that we’re talking about doing our next project together. But I feel like, you know, I really want to study all of the film makers that I work with and gain as much knowledge as possible before I take the plunge and get behind the camera,” Wahlberg said.4
Medill sophomore Christina Amoroso is a PLAY content editor. She can be reached at [email protected].
