He wanted to pay tribute to his own hometown.
After working together on Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon, actor Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg reunited to make a third true story about heroism, Patriots Day, set around the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Wahlberg says he was drawn to the film because it's set in his hometown.
Mark Wahlberg stars in Patriots Day
"Boston didn't always have the best reputation," he says. "But I was really inspired by the way people responded, and I wanted to tell this story. It's never been more difficult or complicated for me to make a movie. It's about my home, my people, my community."
When the project was first announced, the reaction was that it was too soon to tell the story. "If you'd just went by what the media was saying, nobody wanted it," he says. "I told Pete early on, 'We're never going to be able to make everybody happy, but we are going to be able to make everybody proud.' That's our job: tell the story, get it right, honour these people."
Watch the trailer for 'Patriots Day' here:
What he liked about the story was that it traces real-life events as a community came together to stop a terrorist. "Having grown up in Boston and having been in situations early in my life where I had been a direct reflection of the racial divide," Wahlberg says, "any time I left Boston I would hear this is how people saw this town. I realised this film could be something that really showed what our community is all about, and how far we've come. And there was the other message. You turn on the news and see this stuff happening everywhere. The message that love, and people coming together and uniting, it is something that needs to be seen and heard."
Was Wahlberg worried about making yet another movie in his hometown? "There was The Perfect Storm, Departed, The Fighter, Ted, Ted 2," he laughs. "Well, let's just say I've made a lot of movies in Boston! But I don't care what my resume said, it still wasn't enough. There are so many great stories to be told here. There are so many great characters."
And what about the other Bostonians in Hollywood, like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon? "They've done a great job, those guys," Wahlberg says. "I think I've made more movies about Boston than them, but we can all co-exist. They can have Cambridge and everything on that side of the bridge. And everything this way, towards the hood, that is mine. I've been to their neck of the woods. I'm not sure they've spent that much time in mine."
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