Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo talk about their tense new miniseries.
July 20, 2007 - Debuting this Sunday on Spike TV, The Kill Point tells a good old-fashioned standoff story, with John Leguizamo as "Mr. Wolf", the leader of a group of bank robbers who are forced to take over a dozen hostages when their plans go awry. Donnie Wahlberg also stars as Horst Cali, a Pittsburgh Police Department Hostage Negotiator who must deal with the crisis. This past week at the TCA (Television Critics Association) Press Tour, the creators of The Kill Point were on hand to talk about the project.
Executive producer James DeMonaco explained that the past of the hostage-takers will be an important component to the story, "In that they're soldiers. There's kind of a political undertone. It's primarily a suspense thriller with political undertones, but it plays in a big way that they're soldiers that are very capable, and therefore are formidable. Donnie is picking up on small clues that these guys are different than your normal hostage-takers, that there's something else behind them. As we go down, you'll see more about their pasts, and what happened in Iraq. It's definitely a big part of the show."
Leguizamo said he felt, "That's the great thing about it, is it has a slow reveal of character, a slow reveal of the past. And the audience are being taken slowly through it. You have to wait it out. It's not all spoon-fed right away quickly."
Wahlberg explained that on The Kill Point, "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 a surprise. And, you know, 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. I try 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."
Wahlberg added, "My character, I think, comes in as a very confident, if not overconfident person. He's got a perfect track record as a hostage negotiator. He probably thinks that 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, and he's brought down to earth very quickly. I think 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 sort of 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."
As for Leguizamo, he said when it came to Mr. Wolf, "I did see him as an antihero. I mean, yeah, for all purposes he is sort of the antagonist of the piece, but the way he was written was he was a hero. We went to Staten Island, because he's from Staten Island. And we went to a V.A., Veterans Administration, and we hung out with them, veterans from Iraq, and they've also been to Afghanistan. A lot of them had done a lot of tours, and we spent a lot of time with these guys, had dinners with them, they cooked for us and everything. They shared their stories and their pain. And that's what hooked me into the show was how do we make these guys as real as possible and address this whole issue of vets coming back?"
"You know, forget the robbery," Leguizamo continued. "Forget the action stuff, because that's all there. It was like how do we make this as real as possible? All the post-traumatic stress syndrome, and guys not getting their benefits. And if you speak against the war, then everything is taken away from them and they become ostracized from everybody. And if you go to therapy, then you become weak. There was a lot of pain in there, and I was hoping to put it into my character, Wolf, and the guys and I spent a lot of time together, more than I usually spend with a lot of actors. But we spend a lot of time together, became a group, and became a real platoon."
The ads for The Kill Point show Wahlberg and Leguizamo facing off with guns, and despite the fact that their characters are in different places for much of the story, Wahlberg promised they still find some opportunities for that kind of situation. However, he added, "I was a little reluctant to do the standoff thing because my character doesn't use weapons so much. He uses words. But there's a whole backstory to that as well. The show is a slow burn, and once it gets rolling, I personally think the show gets better and better as it goes. The action gets greater and greater, and there is a lot of— there's a lot of time for some serious action, and John and I get to do a lot of it as well without revealing too much. It's really a fun show, and I think people, if they hang in there with it, they would be pleasantly surprised with where it goes."
