Donnie Wahlberg: The Cop at the Heart of Saw 2

Ex-pop star Donnie Wahlberg (New Kids on the Block) has come a long way from his tough, big family Boston upbringing to achieve success in first the music world and now, in films. Like his actor brother Mark, Donnie left the music scene behind and prefers his acting gigs. If your love of pop groups doesn't go back as far as "New Kids", you might have caught Donnie in The Sixth Sense or as part of the kidnapper gang in Mel Gibson's Ransom. He was a soldier in the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers" as well and one of the victims of the aliens in Dreamcatcher.

Now the actor portrays a seasoned, bitter cop who feels guilty for giving his son a hard time in the visceral, clever horror film Saw 2. [Warning: Saw 2 is R-rated for violence and gore and stuff. Hey, it's a Halloween horror film. Make your choice accordingly]. What is it with Wahlbergs and Boston Red Sox baseball caps? Donnie, like his bro, showed up at our interview wearing black Sox cap, crisp white shirt and jeans. Uncharacteristically, he entered the room looking kind of sullen and brooding. We thought, 'uh oh...he's gone Hollywood. He's going to be difficult to talk to' but... friendly Donnie just couldn't hold the "act" and burst into a big grin...

Donnie: I tried to come in and act like I was some a**hole but I can't do it. [he shakes hands with us]. I did a press junket last year with a specific actor whose name I'm not going to say and man, he was [grumpy]. I really like him but I saw a side of him I didn't expect. He'd come into a room and be like 'what the f**k! Why are you askin' me that, man?' I was like 'Aww, that dude's not happy today'.

TeenHollywood: What do you think about the White Sox beating the Red Sox?

Donnie: Well, I knew it would take a special team to beat the Red Sox. You didn't think they'd lose to just anyone did ya? Naw, I'm cool. The Red Sox have a one year grace period with me after, look eighty-five or eighty-six years, we forgive them for losing one year now.

TeenHollywood: What drew you to this film? Did you see the first Saw?

Donnie: Yeah. I really liked the first one. It appealed to me, as a viewer, on a lot of levels. I thought it was fun. Thought it took chances. I felt like I was watching a movie by some young filmmakers who had an idea and took a chance and pushed real hard and got it made. I knew the movie was appealing to young people as well. And, I could see kids, hopefully, not making slasher films, but being inspired by it. It almost looked like some dudes made the movie with their digital camera and went home and edited it on their home computer with some software that they downloaded from the internet. I could see kids saying 'I could do that. I could make a movie like that'.

TeenHollywood: What else did you like about it?

Donnie: I'm not a huge horror fan but I like good horror movies, the type of horror movies that only come around every ten years which, to me, was Scream for example. It kind of redefined the genre and broke the rules and changed the way that people were doing horror movies and I thought that Saw was the next one to come along that did that for me. How many times do you go to the movies nowadays where you leave talking about the movie like for a couple of days? Like my wife was like 'I didn't sleep for three days because of that movie'. It wasn't just teenagers. It was everybody.

TeenHollywood: Why was that do you think?

Donnie: I think because, at its core, there was a human character who was guilty of something we're all guilty of which is taking for granted what we have. There's a lot more to it. There's a sick sadistic serial killer or serial therapist who has decided he's going to teach us how to appreciate what we have. But, I think all the viewers of the movie, at some point, they all say 'wow, what if that was me? Could I do that?' when Cary Elwes is reaching for that phone and he can't get it and his wife and daughter are on the other end of the line, that's heavy.

That said, the sequel comes my way and I was excited and also terribly frightened by it. I felt like, 'yeah, I really liked the first one. If this thing can be close to the first one, it would be pretty cool and I would take part in it'. But, the scary thing was I didn't want to do like Blair Witch 2. That was the first thing that came into my head because the first one was so different, I was like 'they better have thought this out really good, man, because I don't want to be that guy that is the face of the cheesy sequel'. I wouldn't do that. When I read the script I thought it had the potential to be close to the first one if not better if we worked our a**es off and didn't just settle for the first pass of the script. We kept working on it constantly and kept pushing to make it right. I thought, 'yeah, this would be something fun'.

TeenHollywood: How much of a trip was it to be in that very recognizable bathroom from the first film?

Donnie: It was a little uncomfortable. Hopefully, my reaction is probably what the audience might feel when they come back. It's like 'holy s**t'. When we revisit that room it's like 'whoa!'. We shot it in a different place. It was a replica of the room and I don't know how they did it. The details were astonishing. You forget little things.

TeenHollywood: A lot of movie sequels just don't work, especially horror movies. Why do you think that is?

Donnie: A memory of a really good movie that stays with you is more like a music video, you remember the highlights. [For the first Saw], you remember the saw and the guy getting up at the end and peeling off the mask and 'oh s**t'! You remember flashes and sometimes you remember them wrong. Everyone swears they see that foot gettin' cut off. They never showed one clip of a foot being cut off. The experience becomes something different than it actually was. Where I think the studios go wrong or the filmmakers go wrong [with sequels] is [thinking] 'Hey, more bodies, blood and chaos and we'll just jam it down their throats and make another 50 million bucks and everyone will be happy'. But with Saw 2, it was 'Okay, how do we make this as clever as the first one, how do we put in the twists and turns and make it satisfying for those real hardcore fans who have watched it twenty times'? The first movie made a hundred million dollars and you ask people what they thought about it and it was like 'it was crazy. Are you doing a sequel? Cool!' I don't want them walking out of the theater on this one saying 'oh, I just got taken for a ride'. I'd like them to walk out saying 'that s**t was fun! They did a good job'. What more can you ask for?

TeenHollywood: What, about your detective character appealed to you? You have a son. Could you identify with this cop whose child is in danger?

Donnie: Well, he's the anti-me in a lot of ways. When I was little, my mother used to work nights. She would leave around 10:30 at night to get on the subway and go into downtown Boston. I wouldn't feel comfortable with my older brothers doing that, never mind my mother. I would sit at the top of the stairs saying goodbye to her and telling her I loved her before she went because I was really scared for her. So, here's this character who has left his boy and the last things he said to him were not cool. I don't ever want to face that reality that I said something mean to somebody and then lost them. It was real easy to channel into that, to channel back to those days sitting on the steps saying goodbye to my mother and knowing that feeling. Besides the fact that his boy is in great jeopardy, he is carrying around that guilt. That was real easy to dial into.

TeenHollywood: Your own son thinks you are pretty cool for being in this movie, right?

Donnie: Yeah. I gave him the masks. I stole some. They had the puppet mask at a party in New York so I stole it and gave it to him but none of the other scary props. The puppet mask was scary enough. I'm The Man for about another six days. We'll have the opening weekend and Halloween day he's going to go to school and most of his friends would have seen the movie and he'll get some pats on the back and I'll be The Man. 'Dude, your dad was good in that movie, man!' The thing that trips me out is he saw the first one behind my back with his friend. They watched it on DVD. He's 12. Where did the time go? It seems like yesterday that he and I were sitting there watching 'Beauty and the Beast' on VHS. Now VHS doesn't exist anymore and his whole week right now is centered upon me and him taking ten of his friends and going to see this movie Friday night at the theater near the house. That's it. He can't wait. This is his movie right now.

TeenHollywood: What does he think about you once being part of the New Kids on the Block group?

Donnie: He came home from school and he said, 'Eminem said New Kids on the Block sucked. Was he talking about you dad'? 'Well, son, he wasn't talking about me and he may not have been that far off in some regard but that was my group, son'. I don't want to tell him to not like Eminem. But, hey, you know that college fund that you want to take and make your own movie with....[you can thank New Kids on the Block for that].

TeenHollywood: What is the 9/11 movie you are doing?

Donnie: It's a mini-series for ABC. It's not about the day. It's based on the 9/11 Commission report and is a very painful walk through hindsight. It's about the real players and the real opportunities we had to prevent a lot of that stuff from happening. For whatever reason, people chose to go left when they could have gone right and, to recreate the day, I don't want to see that day ever again, but to recreate the circumstances leading up to the day, it's really profound and I think it will make people look more closely at who is in charge and what their decision-making process is.

TeenHollywood: Who do you play in Annapolis?

Donnie: I play a guy named Lieutenant Commander Burton who works at the Naval Academy and is part of the admissions board and he's a guy who takes a chance on James Franco's character who is a guy from the wrong side of the tracks totally not cut out to be a leader but, somehow my character thinks he's worth taking a shot on. It's up to Tyrese's character to flush that out of him.

TeenHollywood: You're also playing a detective in Silence, another movie written by Leigh Whannell who wrote both "Saws". Is Silence as disturbing as Saw?

Donnie: Silence is disturbing in a whole other way, and that's all I'm going to say about that. [Laughs] It's not like these movies, no. I mean, it's the same writers, but the guy who wrote The Ring, actually, did one of the revisions. It's not anything like Saw. It's more of a ghost story and a thriller than it is a horror movie. It fits more into that quasi-horror genre like The Grudge. I don't really call those horror movies. They're sort of inspired by The Sixth Sense.

TeenHollywood: So, despite the intensity, did you have fun on Saw 2? We hear some pranks were pulled.

Donnie: I was determined to have fun on this movie. I was, like, 'I'm going to have a good time, and I'm going to put corpses in people's bathrooms, and I'm going to play practical jokes, and I'm going to have fun - and when the camera's on, when I need to get ready and put myself out there and take chances, I'll do it'. And that's what I did.

TeenHollywood: Who did you get with the corpse in the bathroom trick?

Donnie: Dina Meyer [who plays Kerry, Mathews' partner and a returnee from the original film] was my favorite test subject. She's pretty unflappable though.

TeenHollywood: Must be fun at your house at Halloween.

Donnie: No, at Halloween I'm all about the candy. I'm not into terrorizing people. I'm into the candy. We couldn't afford candy when I was little. We'd, like, steal candy. And when Halloween came we were, like, the Wahlberg Squirrels - like collection nuts. That guaranteed a candy bar every day until Christmas because of Halloween. That was my deal at Halloween.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.