Kill Point: Donnie Wahlberg

CraveOnline: You’d worked with Leguizamo on a low budget movie years ago. Were you able to bond coming back together?

Donnie Wahlberg: I’ll tell you honestly for me, I don’t really get too intimidated by people. It’s not necessarily that I was intimidated by it. When we were shooting that movie, it was a very problematic film. A lot of the actors were looking for the movie to get shut down. I saw a real dark side. For my second movie, I was seeing some real dark behavior. But John kept working on his character. While other people would come into my trailer saying, “Look, stand with us, we can get this movie shut down and get our money and go home,” John was “Hey, come to my hotel tonight, I’m rehearsing, let’s rehearse our scenes.” It’s true but for me, I wasn’t necessarily intimidated or nervous but I certainly wanted to show this guy that I had grown. It was only my second film when I worked with him so I was hopeful that he might see some growth and say wow.

CraveOnline: How do you maintain a rapport when you’re mostly talking on the phone, probably with some other guy reading his lines for you?

Donnie Wahlberg: I liked that we didn’t do it together. At first I was a little concerned but there’s a certain comfort that we would have had. For example, I shot my side of the first few phone calls two weeks before he shot his side. If he had to go and be off camera reading all those lines for 50 takes, it’s going to become old to him. I felt really uncomfortable on every phone call because I’m reading with basically an extra or a stand in who’s reading the lines and I know he’s reading them nothing like John’s going to do it. But the thing that does help I think is that I was uncomfortable and there was an unfamiliarity with the person reading it. Because we didn’t know each other. I tried to use that.

CraveOnline: Are you the type of actor who has to research cops to play one?

Donnie Wahlberg: I did a lot of research for this guy because it was a different type of cop. It was a negotiator which I’ve never done. So I worked with a guy named Jack Cambria from the NYPD hostage negotiation team. He’s the best. He’s one of the best guys in the country. He trains everyone. They use his methods everywhere.

CraveOnline: It’s entertainment, but could this story help bring attention to Iraq veterans?

Donnie Wahlberg: The bottom line with the show is that soldiers go through hell. The show is not really trying to make a political statement but there’s a reality that people come home and they’re displaced. They’re displaced from society and life and they’ve seen horrible, horrible things. Even my character, I’m playing a cop, one of the most profound moments in the show for me which you guys haven’t seen yet is when one of the hostages come out and the state she’s in has a profound effect on my character and it really changes his direction for the rest of the series. But Steve SChill and I spoke all the time about cops. They all end up divorced and stuff because they can’t talk to their wives about what they do, or their husbands if it’s a female cop. Because it’s so bad and miserable, how do you bring that home? So if I can experience that as a cop or understand that playing a cop, imagine the levels that soldiers go through. The horrors that they see, it’s amazing that stuff like this doesn’t happen all the time, that soldiers don’t come back and just completely lose it left and right. Can you imagine being in Iraq right now? It’s insane.

CraveOnline: Is this more like doing a movie since it’s a finite end, or still like a series because it’s so long?

Donnie Wahlberg: It’s better to do eight episodes and know you’re doing eight than to do eight when you’re thinking you’re doing 22. Would I do another series? This is a series to me. This is the way TV’s going anyway. It’s going shorter, more compact and also too, when you’re doing 22 episodes a year, most television actors get burnt out. They’re burnt out. That’s not to say all of them but a lot of them, they’re really burnt out. It’s hard to give your soul all that time. It’s like you pick an episode and go for it.

CraveOnline: How do you keep yourself together on this physically for this?

Donnie Wahlberg: That’s the beauty of doing eight hours. It’s much easier. You can kind of go. It’s just different. You can sprint a little bit more. You can kind of get running and run.

CraveOnline: Are cable shows better than network?

Donnie Wahlberg: For me, I didn’t really like make a conscious choice to go to cable. I just liked the show and I love John and I’d almost worked with James DeMonaco a few times before who wrote the show. He wrote another show that I almost did a few years ago so I had a good rapport with him but I’ll tell you, having done it, the freedom is insane. I don't know that all cable networks are this way but I don't think I saw a network executive once on set. I mean, Steve Schill is a very hands off director and we had hands off executives and so it just trickled down and there was so much freedom. It felt great. Coming from the CW which honestly I don’t regret many choices I’ve made and I certainly don’t regret working with Darren Starr and Leslie Hope and some great people, but I’m just not a CW man. So to do this show after that when you feel kind of hopeless about the process, to fall into this show with so much freedom and ability to create, I just feel really happy and really lucky. I don't know if that resonates with the audiences. I think people do also who watch cable and regular network television, they do feel a certain freedom when they watch the cable shows and I think it probably does trickle down. It trickles down from the executives to the cast and the crews and the directors and probably the audience feels that as well. There’s a lot more leeway and for me that’s important because I was really unhappy on my last job and that doesn’t happen to me very often. I usually am really grateful for all the work that I get. To be unhappy at work, it’s not fun. It’s not fun. But that’s what happens when you have someone changing the color of your sweater six times when you don’t even want to wear a sweater. You’re playing a fugitive. At least let the sweater have a few holes.

CraveOnline: Were you surprised by The Kill Point reading the scripts?

Donnie Wahlberg: I actually did something that I don’t usually do which is I did read the first four episodes and then I stopped. I needed to read the first four and really be up to speed on the first four because we shot the bulk of my stuff from the first four in a group. I really left the second half of it sort of to surprise. I think my character sort of works as a facilitator to the audience in the way he gathers information. He gets information as he goes and as he’s learning it, the audience is learning it. Sometimes you may know something about the hostage takers beforehand through seeing scenes with them, but for the most part, as the information comes into my character, it’s then funneled out to the audience so I tried to do that a little bit in my preparation, to not know everything. I didn’t want to know everything that was going on. I didn’t necessarily want to take part in the scenes that they were doing or be around when they were shooting it. One great thing about the show is I think it gets better as it goes on and the characters change as the show goes on. It’s a real journey. The show promises something to the audience, that this is going to get very deep and it’s going to take you somewhere and it really does. My character I think comes in as a very confident if not overconfident person. He’s got a perfect record as a hostage negotiator. He probably things, 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. He’s brought down to earth very quickly. He’s a character who believes in what he does, cares tremendously about what he does and I think in the first two episodes you probably see the character being a little quirky with the English language and stuff like that, but I think that’s really just a way for him to vent his frustration, because when you’re a hostage negotiator, you have to be very patient with the bad guys. You have to have all the patience in the world for them. So he uses the people around him as his sort of venting board so he can be patient with the antiheroes.

CraveOnline: Yeah, he’s obsessed with grammar, correcting people’s sentences.

Donnie Wahlberg: Yeah, my character doesn’t like when people speak improper English but he doesn’t always speak proper English himself. Again, it’s used as a character quirk in that patient with the hostage takers, everyone else is going to get all the aggression that he can’t show to the hostage takers. So anyone in that command center is fair game to be abused by this guy. The English language thing, it’s sort of a quirk but it’s a way for him to vent. It’s a way for him to pick apart things because he can’t necessarily pick apart Mr. Wolf. He has to be patient with him.

CraveOnline: Will we ever see you on Entourage?

Donnie Wahlberg: Probably not on Entourage. It’s possible. I never work in LA so I’m just never here. I am based on L.A. but I’ve worked out of state the last three years. I worked out of the country on probably six of my last seven gigs, be it Toronto or Morocco, I’ve been everywhere.

CraveOnline: Do you like the traveling with a family?

Donnie Wahlberg: Sometimes. Sometimes it really suits me to travel. That’s what I come from. I come from the music business and touring. If I’m home for a month, I get antsy anyway so if a job pops up for a few weeks, it’s good to go but the better part, 60% of the last three years, 70% of the last three years, that’s probably a little bit much.

CraveOnline: Are you and Mark competing to see who can play characters in the darkest, most stressful situations?

Donnie Wahlberg: I just finished working with John and now John is leaving me for another Wahlberg. He’s going to go work with Mark right now which will be a stressful situation in itself. Fortunately, I will prepare Mark for what he’s in for, having worked with John now for the second time. But no, there’s no competition with me certainly. I suspect there’s not with him. Honestly, transitioning from street kids in Dorchester 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 nother challenger. I think we have different agendas to be quite frank. In the music world, I was part of a band that was as big as you could possibly get. I know what that level of success is like and 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. For me it’s all about the work now and 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 my goal is not to be a superstar. My goal is to be super at what I do.

CraveOnline: Do you talk business with Mark?

Donnie Wahlberg: Very rarely do we discuss anything like that. It’s “Hey, how you doing, how’s the kids?” Go and play some golf.

CraveOnline: How much do you play?

Donnie Wahlberg: I don’t play as much as him. I don’t play as good as him either but he takes lessons with Tiger Woods’ coach. I don’t. I take them from the drunk guy on the second hole.

Kill Point starts this week on Spike TV.