Imagine you’re Mark Wahlberg: you’ve gone from being a hoodlum on the streets of Boston to an underwear model to a mediocre rapper to an Academy-Award-nominee. What would you do next?

Star in an action film, obviously. With “Shooter,” a thriller about sniper Bob Lee Swagger—who is framed in an attempted assassination of the president—Mark Wahlberg returns to a rough-and-tumble role similar to the butt-kicking captain he played in “Planet of the Apes.” But according to the actor, moviegoers can expect to see a very different Wahlberg this time around.

SNIPER SCHOOL

“It’s an extremely difficult job,” says Wahlberg about being a sniper in a phone interview with the Crimson. “There’s not much glamour involved in it at all. It takes a lot of discipline, and they are as smart as they are tough.”

Fortunately, the actor says he was up for the challenge. To play Swagger, Wahlberg didn’t rely on his previous experience with action films—instead, he trained. Hard.

While Wahlberg drew from an entire childhood growing up on Boston streets for his role of Sergeant Dignam in “The Departed,” the actor had not had any sniper training prior to “Shooter.” To prepare for the role, Wahlberg and director Antoine Fuqua used the expertise of US Marine sniper Sergeant Patrick Garrity.

“We went to sniper school, and physically I had to really transform,” Wahlberg explains. “Before, I was much heavier, from ‘The Departed.’ So I had to get in physical and mental shape.”

Not only was Wahlberg’s physical training more extreme than that of other films, but the weaponry was different as well.

“I had fired other weapons in other movies, obviously, but I had never done something as intense as sniper training,” says the actor, who commanded sizable guns in several films, such as “Four Brothers.” “We shot a 50 caliber, which was the big weapon that we used.”

A ‘GUY’S GUY’

Wahlberg feels that such details make his performance credible and engaging, as does his stunt work.

“I did everything Antoine asked me to do, which was pretty much all of it,” he says, referring to the stunts in the movie. “You certainly want the audience to feel like they’re really watching me go through all these things and not feel like they’re cutting away to a stuntman constantly. So [I did] more than was probably safe, but, you know, we survived, so it was worth it.”

But Wahlberg says that what distinguishes “Shooter” from other action films is not its stunts but rather its focus on character development. That appeal prompted the 35-year-old actor, who has repeatedly declared that he plans on retiring from acting at 40, to take this role.

“The high-intensity action movies that they’ve been making lately aren’t really the kind of character-driven movies that I love and that I grew up watching in the ’70s. This is kind of a throw-back to that,” Wahlberg says, explaining that “Shooter” offered the rare opportunity to emulate his favorite childhood characters.

“You’ve got a guy’s guy who’s all about honor and integrity, and it reminded me of the great films that I grew up watching. It’s much more of a Travis Bickle [from ‘Taxi Driver’] or a ‘Dirty Harry,’ than it is a ‘Terminator’-type character,” he says.

PURE PLEASURE?

Swagger, a bad-ass with a soulful side, might not be an Oscar-worthy role, but according to Wahlberg, “Shooter” is a movie people will like.

“I certainly can’t just start looking for, like, English period dramas and stuff that’s going to get me nominated [for an Academy Award] again,” he says. “Basically, now we choose by which films we want to go and see in the theater, which roles we think people would want to see us in.”