Mark Wahlberg: ‘I just want to make movies’ my fans want to see

Mark Wahlberg isn’t about playing it safe. The rapper-turned-model-turned-actor-turned-producer is seemingly always on the go. But at the root of it all, Wahlberg, 40, whose new film, “Contraband,” opens Friday, says nothing makes him happier than cinematic comfort food. “I’m getting older and realizing what’s important in life,” the actor says. “I just want to make movies that I think people want to see and take on roles that I think people will want to see me in.” In “Contraband,” Wahlberg merges action man with family man as Chris Farraday, a reformed criminal who gets pulled back into the dangerous game of international smuggling after his brother-in-law botches a major deal for a two-bit crime boss (Giovanni Ribisi). Chris is forced to do a run to Panama, leaving his wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale), and sons in New Orleans with his onetime partner (Ben Foster). But redemption and revenge get snarled up on the way back. Wahlberg says filming the thriller was especially poignant for him because his own life has been littered with a few detours. “I could certainly identify with it, because in my own life. I’ve had a pretty troubled past,” he says. “And you hope, too, that these are themes that people can identify with — whether it be on an emotional level or a fighting level.” Wahlberg has traveled far since coming to the movies. He made a big impression in “Boogie Nights”; co-starred with George Clooney and Ice Cube in “Three Kings”; worked with Clooney again in “The Perfect Storm”; cracked “The Italian Job,” and was the last man standing amongst Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 Best Picture winner “The Departed,” which earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination. “People always ask me if ‘The Departed’ changed the way I make choices. Absolutely not,” Wahlberg says in his definitive, no-B.S. Boston accent. “I want to continue to do things the way I’ve been doing them, and to keep surrounding myself with a lot of talented people.” He turned his real-life experiences with his hometown pals into HBO’s hit series “Entourage,” and was a producer on last year’s drama “The Fighter,” in which he played real-life boxer Micky Ward. The film earned Oscars for Christian Bale and Melissa Leo. That film’s scrappy energy reflected its star’s never-say-die attitude toward the project he nurtured for years. Wahlberg says that after the grueling behind-the-scenes work on “The Fighter,” he consciously avoided training for the action sequences in “Contraband,” instead opting to enjoy the local cuisine and culture on location in both New Orleans and Panama. (This past fall, he enjoyed some New York dishes was filming “Broken City” with Russell Crowe and Catherine Zeta-Jones.) “I was boycotting any kind of training because I’d trained for so long for ‘The Fighter,’” he says. “I just ate a lot of food.” Did that non-action-hero regimen gel with director Baltasar Kormákur’s filming schedule? Wahlberg sounds like he couldn’t have cared less. “It was incredible, like going to the Wild West,” he says. “You get on a plane, and it’s like no one was monitoring what we were shooting, what we were doing. We were just left to our own devices.” Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/mark-wahlberg-i-movies-fans-contraband-article-1.1004223#ixzz1jIBe0mDR