HE’S PAST GETTING BEATEN UP
Wahlberg seeks more dialogue, less action
Mark Wahlberg doesn’t want to get beaten up.
While promoting his newest action flick, “Spenser Confidential” — which drops on Netflix on Friday — the native Bostonian told the Daily News he’s “not the thrill-seeker that I used to be.”
Wahlberg did his own stunt work in the film, but said those days could be ending.
“I don’t need to be doing all of it myself . ... Like I’m not trying to jump out of planes and do all that stuff anymore,” Wahlberg, 48, explained to The News last week. “I prefer to just focus on like, scene work, dialogue.”
He says he’s not too keen on “getting beaten up” and the overall action part of the genre, though there’s plenty in this film, which sees Wahlberg (inset) as — what else? — a Boston ex-cop.
After getting out of prison, the character finds himself investigating the deaths of former colleagues. Loosely based on the novel, “Wonderland,” by Ace Atkins — who took over Robert B. Parker’s “Spenser” novels after his death in 2010 — “Spenser Confidential” is not based on ABC’s 1980s series, “Spenser: For Hire,” though they all center on the same character.
“I didn’t go back and look at the series. I mean I hadn’t seen it for years, obviously,” Wahlberg said, adding that he’d been a fan of the show growing up. “So it was just trying to create our own thing.”
Ultimately, Wahlberg says he relished “playing a kind of cool, reluctant hero that fights injustice and helping people who’ve been wronged.”
He also loved seeing his hometown on-screen — not an uncommon occurrence for the “Other Guys” actor.
While filming “Spenser,” Wahlberg had a “pretty surreal” experience sitting on his childhood stoop as the crew prepped to film on the same street.
“I always love that [filming in Boston] brings jobs,” Wahlberg told The News, noting he “put a bunch of my friends and locals in the movie . ... I always just love seeing areas of Boston that I grew up seeing, driving in a bus or driving in the truck with my dad. Seeing those on-screen is always really cool.”
Among his other Boston films are Martin Scorsese’s Best Picture winner, “The Departed,” the “Ted” comedies, “Patriots Day,” and Best Picture nominee “The Fighter,” which was set in Lowell, about 30 miles northwest of Boston.
If he could only choose to be remembered by Scorsese’s ensemble crime film or David O. Russell’s sports biopic though, Wahlberg would pick the latter, in which he starred as Micky Ward.
In particular, Wahlberg treasured playing the boxer and “reminding people of what a great industrial talent Lowell is, as opposed to having a bad rap for the HBO documentary, “High on Crack Street.”
“There’s a lot of good hardworking people there,” he continued. “Micky was not only a Boston hero. He was a local, he was one of us. So, to tell his story and to inspire people, that was really cool.”
Despite his current lukewarm relationship with stunt work, Wahlberg’s incarnation of Spenser might go beyond the new flick.
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