Mark Wahlberg Surprised Wife with His Shaved Head for Flight Risk Role: Her Reaction Was ‘Priceless’
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Mark Wahlberg brought a surprise haircut home to his wife Rhea Durham when he started filming his latest movie.
The actor, 53, appears with a partially bald head in his new movie directed by Mel Gibson, Flight Risk. He tells PEOPLE he opted to have his head shaved each day while filming the movie rather than wear a bald cap.
“There was no bald cap. I shaved the middle and left the horseshoe around the sides. We just shaved it,” he says. “They would shave the top as close to the scalp as possible every day, obviously, because we didn’t have any stubble or anything. So I just hid it with a hat.”
“But the most priceless thing was seeing my wife’s face when I took my hat off after getting the hair cut for work that day,” he says.
The trailer for Flight Risk shows Wahlberg as a pilot flying a federal agent (Michelle Dockery) and a fugitive (Topher Grace) across Alaska — until he reveals himself as a hit man sent to kill the fugitive rather than let him testify in an upcoming trial.
Wahlberg and Durham, 45, have been married since 2009 and share four kids: Ella, 20, Michael, 18, Brendan, 15 and Grace, 14. He tells PEOPLE he expects his kids will enjoy his performance in Flight Risk — and the wild hair cut that came with the part.
“Oh, they’re gonna love it. My kids — my boys especially — they loved the hair cut,” he says. “They got a lot of laughs out of that.”
Wahlberg tells PEOPLE that he, Gibson, 68, Dockery, 42, and Grace, 45, filmed Flight Risk in just 22 days, so he only wore the shaved head look for a few weeks before ditching it altogether.
“I don’t like the makeup chair. I mean, I don’t like touchups and all that stuff,” he says. “I kind of like to do all that prep and everything leading up to it. Then by the time we’re actually working, I don’t like to be kind of picked and poked and prodded. I like to kind of just do my thing.”
“For me, yeah, it’s not fun. You know, hopefully I can just kind of become the character,” Wahlberg adds. “Wearing a fake — either a wig or mustache, I always feel like it feels ridiculous.”
