Mark Wahlberg was not taking his new villainous turn lightly as he stayed in character so much that he had to apologize to the cast afterward.
Flight Risk has become the latest Mel Gibson-directed movie to make number one at the box office over the weekend. However, despite taking the top spot, its numbers were very humble at $12 million. For a movie that takes place in a singular location of a plane, that number might sound like a rousing success, but with a budget of $25 million, it has a bit of a way to go to recoup its expenses. In the scaled-down thriller, Mark Wahlberg would make a rare turn as a villain after his career in action movies saw him primarily saw him as the hero. Wahlberg would last play a bad guy in the 1996 thriller Fear.
According to People Magazine, Wahlberg was so determined to get this part right that he later had to apologize to his co-stars for staying in character. The star admitted, “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.” Wahlberg added,
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. 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.”
With the movie taking place in a plane for the runtime, Wahlberg’s character in Flight Risk wouldn’t be limited to physical altercations with the protagonists of the movie, but his character would continuously supply verbal jabs throughout. The actor talks about the inspirations he took in forming his performance, “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 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. I don’t know, I just kept all these ideas popping into my head about how I would play that particular role.”
