Mark Wahlberg in Flight Risk. Photo:
Courtesy of Lionsgate
Mark Wahlberg indulged in a rare opportunity to portray the villain in his latest movie.
In his new thriller Flight Risk, the Boogie Nights actor, 53, plays a hit man pretending to be a pilot, whose latest targets are U.S. marshal Madelyn (Michelle Dockery) and Winston (Topher Grace), a fugitive who she has detained out of Alaska.
“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 says of staying in character on set. He last portrayed a villain 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,” he adds. “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.”
Michelle Dockery in Flight Risk. Courtesy of Lionsgate
Flight Risk marks his first time acting in a Mel Gibson-directed film. Wahlberg and Gibson previously acted together in movies like 2022’s Father Stu and 2017’s Daddy’s Home 2. Wahlberg told PEOPLE back in June 2024 that he decided he wanted to play the film’s villain after Gibson, 69, sent him the film’s script and “didn’t even say which role” he envisioned Wahlberg playing.
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Wahlberg is not just any villain in Flight Risk — his character torments his adversaries throughout the movie as they joust physically and verbally for control over a small passenger plane in the Alaskan wilderness.
Mark Wahlberg in Flight Risk. Lionsgate
“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,” he adds of inspiration for the role. “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 now in theaters.
