[IMG:L]Attempting to emerge from both the shadow of a boy band past and a box office star brother might be a daunting prospect, but it hasn’t stopped Donnie Wahlberg from carving his own niche in Hollywood and earning respect as an actor. Wahlberg, the older brother of Mark Wahlberg, shifted show business gears after the 1994 demise of New Kids on the Block, making his movie debut in Bullet two years later and subsequently segueing to bigger and better projects like The Sixth Sense, Band of Brothers and Boomtown.
Now, his reinvention complete, Wahlberg stars in Spike TV’s eight-hour hostage drama series The Kill Point, playing a Pittsburgh police department hostage negotiator opposite John Leguizamo as his adversary, the leader of a group of disgruntled Iraq War vets whose attempt at robbing a bank goes terribly awry. It premieres July 22 at 9/8c.
“My character comes in as a very confident, if not overconfident person,” Wahlberg says. “He’s got a perfect track record as a hostage negotiator. He probably thinks, while there are lives at stake, this is a walk in the park for him. And he realizes very quickly that these are very formidable guys, and it’s not going to be the typical walk in the park that he expects, and he’s brought down to earth very quickly.
“My character works as a facilitator to the audience in the way he gathers information,” Wahlberg continues. “He gets information as he goes, and as he’s learning it, the audience is learning it. In some ways my character ends up suffering a little bit of Stockholm syndrome as well and really starts to develop a rapport; he was still affected [by] and really drawn to this guy,” he adds, referring to Leguizamo’s war-scarred vet, Mr. Wolf.
Wahlberg himself can understand the desperation of his opponent’s situation. “The bottom line is that soldiers go through hell. People come home and they’re displaced, distanced from society and life and have seen horrible things. It’s amazing when they don’t come home and completely lose it,” he points out. “This show is definitely not intended to condemn or to suggest that Iraq veterans are coming back to society and going crazy. But the reality is, you can’t imagine what it’s like being in a war and to have to come back home. It’s gotta be unbelievable.”
The Kill Point was a reunion for him and Leguizamo, who worked together on Wahlberg’s second film, the 1998 heist drama Body Count, but their tense phone conversations were shot separately.
“I shot my side of the first few phone calls two weeks before he shot his side,” Wahlberg reveals. “I felt really uncomfortable on every phone call because I read with an extra or stand-in, knowing he’s reading the lines nothing like John is going to do it. But I liked that we didn’t do it together. At first I was a little bit concerned but there is a certain comfort that we would have had. There was unfamiliarity with the person reading and tried to use that.”
Wahlberg has played cops before, but “did a lot of research for this guy because it was a different type of cop. It was a negotiator, which I have never done, so I worked with a guy named Jack Cambria from the NYPD hostage negotiation team. He trains everyone and they use his methods everywhere,” he notes.
Wahlberg’s character’s penchant for correcting others’ English while mangling the language himself may seem like a random quirk, but there’s a reason behind it: “It’s a way to vent his frustration, which he can’t do with the bad guys. He uses the people around him as his venting boards so he can be patient with the antiheroes.”
This being Spike TV, there’s as much “serious action” as talk, says Wahlberg. “It’s a slow burn, and if people hang in there with it they’ll be pleasantly surprised with where it goes.” Besides the story and script, he was drawn to the idea of doing a finite eight hours rather than the open-ended format most series on network TV take. “Doing 22 episodes a year, most actors get burnt out, and it’s hard to give your soul all the time. That’s the beauty of doing eight episodes–you can sprint a little more.”
Wahlberg’s last series experience on The CW’s short-lived Runaway was less than satisfying. “I was really unhappy,” he admits. “To be unhappy at work is not fun, and that is what happens when you have someone changing the color of your sweater six times when you don’t even want to wear a sweater. I’m playing a fugitive–at least let the sweater have a few holes in it.”
Not one to complain, Wahlberg adds, “I’m usually really grateful for all the work I get. I certainly don’t regret working with [creator] Darren Star or [co-star] Leslie Hope and some great people, but I’m just not a CW man.”
But when asked if he’d appear on the HBO series Entourage, based on the real-life posse of his brother Mark, he’s non-committal. “I guess I would do it, but it’s never come up. I don’t even know when they shoot. I am based in L.A. but I have worked out of state for the last three years. I have worked out of the country on probably six of the last seven gigs. Toronto, Morocco–I’ve been everywhere. Sometimes it really suits me to travel,” he says, noting that old touring habits die hard. “If I’m home for a month I get antsy, so if a job pops up for a few weeks it’s good.”
The father of two, he talks about family and golf, not shop, when he and Mark connect. “I don’t play as much as he does and I don’t play as well as him, either. He takes lessons with Tiger Woods. I take them from the drunk guy on the second hole,” Wahlberg quips.
The actor brothers aren’t competitive when it comes to the business, either. “There’s no competition with me, certainly, and I suspect there’s not with him. We’re both very fortunate. Transitioning from street kids from Dorchester [Mass.] to any level of success is amazing in its own right. And not to pat myself on the back, it’s just by the grace of a greater power and a little bit of hard work, but transitioning also from music to acting was a whole other challenge. I think we have different agendas, to be quite frank,” he continues.
“I was part of a band that was as big as you could possibly get. I know what that level of success is like. It’s not really what motivates me. I’ve been lucky as an actor to work with some of the best people in the business–actors, directors–from my very first job, and for me it’s all about the work now. It’s all about trying to find great projects, work with great people, and become better at my craft. I think Mark has loftier goals than me. Not that success frightens me. It’s just I know my goal is not to be a superstar. My goal is to be super at what I do.”
In September, Wahlberg will shoot Righteous Kill, about a cop suspected of being a serial killer, though he won’t reveal what his role is. He’s understandably excited. “It’s Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro,” he says. “I would sweep floors on that movie.”
