Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 26, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
With pretty much everybody except Jigsaw himself dead or dying by the end of Saw, a whole new group of victims and adversaries needed to be created for Saw II. This time, the diabolical plotter (played by Tobin Bell) is off the floor and receives more screen time as he ensnares troubled detective Eric Mathews (Donnie Wahlberg) in his sadistic game. Jigsaw has imprisoned eight disparate people in a booby trap-rigged house, and invites Eric to watch along on a video monitor as the increasingly frantic group attempt to escape their captivity or die trying. The stakes are high for Eric, too—one of the players in this deadly game is his own teenaged son.
Wahlberg, the pop star turned actor who is perhaps best-known for shooting Bruce Willis at the beginning of The Sixth Sense, was enthusiastic—but guardedly so—when offered Saw II’s lead. “I had concerns and hopes that we could do a high-quality job that would come close to or be even better than the original,” he says. “I mean, they had no money to make the first movie, and obviously there were going to be more resources this time, so I was hoping that would translate into better quality. But given what they were able to do with the original, we had to work really hard to match that in terms of surprising the audience and making them cringe and scream. There’s a real danger in doing sequels; quite frankly, most of them aren’t done well, so I made it a priority that every time I was on set, we would execute it as well as possible.
“I believe that’s one of the reasons they wanted me to do the movie,” he continues, “because they know what I bring to the table—I work hard at everything I do and try to make it the best. I’m not a selfish actor; I’m not worried about me looking better than anyone else. It’s all about what I’m part of being better than anything else.”
A key element of that approach involved making contributions and alterations to his portions of the script (by director Darren Lynn Bousman and the returning Leigh Whannell), which sees Eric locked into an intense psychological faceoff with Jigsaw as a clock literally ticks down to his son’s doom. “The whole Jigsaw/Eric relationship was really dicey to me,” Wahlberg recalls. “The two guys are just sitting there, and my character has a choice whether or not he wants to be there. In some ways you could say that he doesn’t, but the choice he makes is to say, “I don’t have a choice, I have to sit here.” But when you cut from eight people in the house being tortured and dying, and one of them has a close relationship with Eric, it had to be more plausible that he could actually stay there with Jigsaw.
“To me, when I first read the script, that wasn’t the strong part,” he continues. “I didn’t want the audience to say, ‘Come on, man, they’re sitting there talking about stupid stuff.’ There’s even a scene where we come back from inside the house and Jigsaw is rambling on about metaphysics and all this, and Eric says, ‘This is bullshit, what are you talking about? You want me to sit here and talk to you, but you’re not saying anything. Say something to me!’ That little scene really reflected the whole issue with the screenplay for me; I was reading it thinking, ‘This guy would not sit there.’ So I wanted that dynamic between Eric and Jigsaw to be more plausible; if it wasn’t believable for me, then it certainly wouldn’t be believable to the audience.”
Wahlberg was assisted in this process by Bell: “I don’t want to toot my own horn, but it’s rare that I come across actors who are willing to work as hard on the material as I am. And he was ready to go all the way; once it was time for us to work together, we were relentless. We’d finish shooting and go right to our hotel, rework the scenes and try different approaches and lines. We kept trying to make sure we always brought it back to what’s important. In the end, it was the director’s and producers’ choice of what they wanted to use, but we gave them many different things, and that’s really a tribute to Tobin’s willingness to work it. He had the same concerns as me, and it’s a lot easier when the person you’re sitting across from also wants to make it the best it can be.”
One particular contribution Wahlberg made was inspired by his own real-life role as a father. “What I kept zeroing in on was Eric and his son, and their relationship,” he explains. “When I talk to my son, I say I love him every time I’m about to hang up the phone, or every time I drop him off at school. Because I want to make sure the last thing I ever say to him is something wonderful. And that’s one of the things we added into the script, when I’m talking to Jigsaw. That was very important to me; one of Eric’s best moments in the film is [when Jigsaw says] ‘What was the last thing you said to your son?’ Because it’s something he has to live with forever; if Eric doesn’t ultimately find his boy, that’s what he’ll remember: The last thing he said was, ‘Go live with your mom, F you,’ or whatever it was. That isn’t cool. That was something I had to have in that scene, because it will make an audience member, if they’re a parent, say, ‘Shit, man, that’s not good. That’s not a good last thing to have said.’ ”
While Saw II is much more extreme and explicit in its horror than Sixth Sense, the two films have one thing in common: Following in the tradition of the original Saw, the sequel leads up to a startling twist ending. Wahlberg, however, laughs off any comparisons between his two genre outings, or the suggestion that that element led him to take the roles. “Is that a genre now, the payoff movie?” he asks rhetorically. “It doesn’t matter to me if it has that surprise ending or not; I just go for the material. In this case, I wasn’t really thinking about doing a horror movie, but when Saw II came my way, there were a few reasons why I gave it more consideration than I would any other horror film. One of the aspects that convinced me was the end, because after the first one, you do have to make the audience go, ‘Oh shit!’ But I also felt that if was going to go into this genre now, these were the filmmakers to do it with.”
Part of that decision lay in his dissatisfaction—one shared by many die-hard fans—with the direction the genre has gone in recently. “If you think about most horror movies that have come out in the years since Scream, what’s been great? Do we really need another sequel to The Exorcist, or remakes of all these ’70s films? Saw came from two guys—I mean, they could have made that in their garage—and quite frankly, the core audience, the young people who went to see that movie, were inspired by it. You can be inspired by a film like [this year’s] Crash, but in this genre, for young filmmakers, Saw is a perfect film. To me, it’s how movies should be made; it doesn’t have to cost the gross national product of almost every country in the world. Saw was a million bucks, and it surprised the audience, it broke the rules, it redefined the genre and it really upped the ante.
“The audiences for these movies are smarter than we give them credit for,” Wahlberg adds. “They’ve seen everything there is to see, so you have to do more than rehash some old ’70s movie for them. They’ve already seen the original! People wonder why young males are leaving the movie theaters and the box office is down—well, they’d rather be at home on the Internet. The Saw films are the kind that are going to pull them back in.”
And since Jigsaw plays on and manipulates the human frailties of his victims, Wahlberg believes there’s even something of a message amidst the Saw movies’ carnage. “If Eric was a little less selfish,” he says, “a little less self-absorbed and wasn’t in his whole world of self-loathing, he would realize that he was being pulled into something, instead of stumbling into it, and realizing too late. That’s kind of like life, isn’t it? Sometimes we’re so worried about ourselves, we miss other stuff, and if you get carried away with that, like my character does, it’ll really get you. In the first film, Cary Elwes’ character’s mistake ultimately put him in his predicament. In real life, if you mess around on your wife, you’re probably not going to end up chained in a bathroom somewhere with a saw—but you can make a real mess out of things, and screw up not only your life, but other lives as well.”
