‘Play Dirty’: Shane Black On Reinventing Parker, Mark Wahlberg Stepping In for RDJ, Marvel Memories, ‘The Nice Guys’ Sequel & More [The Discourse Podcast]

The underworld is crowded with thieves, but Parker has always stood apart. Created by Donald Westlake in the early 1960s, the character has been portrayed on screen by actors including Lee Marvin, Mel Gibson, and Jason Statham. He's a blunt-force professional who isn’t Bond, isn’t Batman, but something rougher, hungrier, and coded by his own ruthless blue-collar sense of order. With "Play Dirty," filmmaker Shane Black takes his own crack at Parker, bringing the character to Prime Video on October 1 and casting Mark Wahlberg in the role. The film follows Parker, a ruthless thief, and his expert crew who stumble onto the heist of a lifetime that pits them against the New York mob. The film also stars LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Keegan-Michael Key, Nat Wolff, and more. 

This version doesn’t come with gadgets or acrobatics. Black describes a Parker who thinks fast, hits harder, and feels closer to the blue-collar world than to the spy fantasy. It’s the kind of material that lets him indulge his taste for pulp grit, sly humor, and the holiday backdrop he’s made famous. But it also opens the door to some bigger questions: what draws audiences to men this uncompromising? How do you make crime fun without sanding off the edges? And what happens when you cast Wahlberg instead of Robert Downey Jr.?

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Writer/Director Shane Black joins The Discourse to talk about the journey of bringing his Parker film to the screen, which started all the way back during the making of Black’s first film, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” in 2005. When asked what itch hadn’t been scratched by earlier adaptations, Black pointed to Parker’s uniqueness. “Each one represents the era in which it was produced. 'Point Blank' with Lee Marvin is a very specific film for that time period. And each actor who’s played Parker from there on, like Robert Duvall, Jason Statham, and Mel Gibson in "Payback."

There has been a history of incarnations of this powerful, relentless character. But he’s not James Bond, which is why I liked him. He’s sort of blue collar. It’s almost like an American entrepreneur's story. But he happens to be a really awful, bad person and a criminal anti-hero.”