REEL DEAL: Contraband - Mark Walberg SPOTLIGHT

Mark  Wahlberg produces and plays  “Chris Farraday” in Baltasar Kormakur’s  CONTRABAND

For Contraband, Director Baltasar Kormákur employed the same casting technique he used during the years he made movies in his home country.  Rather than choosing an actor by his or her looks, the director casts according to the performer’s personality.  “I like to find the core of people,” he says.  “The outer appearance is less important.  What is the person?  You try to figure that out and make that right for the character.”  

The first actor cast was the same man to whom the director brought his ideas for a film inspired by the one in which he last performed.  Kormákur commends: “Mark Wahlberg has a mixture of boyish charm and toughness, and you believe him as a blue-collar guy.  Chris has actually walked out of the criminal world, but then he’s forced back in.  That’s the great thing about heist-thrillers.  It’s great to see people step outside the norm and do something that the rest of us wouldn’t do.”

Describing his character, Wahlberg explains: “Chris is definitely a thinker, but he is not afraid to raise his voice or get his hands dirty.”  For Wahlberg, when his character finds himself back in the game, and possibly over his head, that’s when the fun begins.  He offers: “Chris is continuing to try to figure out a way to survive, to still solve the problem and then get his ass home to his wife and kids.”

What drew you to this project?

I saw the original movie and really liked it a lot.  These are the kind of movies I like to watch, with the kind of characters I like to play. Now our new thing is to try to find cool European films, obtain the rights and remake them.

Can you describe your character, Chris Farraday?

He is just a good, hard-working guy trying to do the right thing. Unfortunately, his brother-in-law is not the sharpest guy around so Chris has to go back and clean up his mess. This forces him back into the world of smuggling.

REEL DEAL: Contraband REVIEW

Based on a great Icelandic movie Reykjavik-Rotterdam, a different way to see the importance of family. What happens whens a simple family life gets involved into a complicated world of gangsters, drugs and smuggling.



Mark Wahlberg leads the cast of Contraband, a white-knuckle action-thriller about a man trying to stay out of a world he worked hard to leave behind and the family he’ll do anything to protect. Set in New Orleans, the film explores the cutthroat underground world of international smuggling—full of desperate criminals and corrupt officials, high-stakes and big payoffs—where loyalty rarely exists and death is one wrong turn away. 


Chris Farraday (Wahlberg) long ago abandoned his life of crime, but after his brother-in-law, Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), botches a drug deal for his ruthless boss, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), Chris is forced back into doing what he does best—running contraband—to settle Andy’s debt. Chris is a legendary smuggler and quickly assembles a crew with the help of his best friend, Sebastian (Ben Foster), to head to Panama and return with millions in counterfeit bills.