Country star Trace Adkins plays desperate dad in ‘Deepwater’

NEW ORLEANS — In one of the climactic scenes in “Deepwater Horizon,” country music fans will spot singer Trace Adkins portraying the father of a missing oil-rig worker demanding details about the environmental disaster that claimed 11 lives.

In a chance encounter on a flight from New Orleans to Chicago — where Adkins had attended the premiere of “Deepwater Horizon” — this reporter was seated next to the singer, who has added TV and film acting to his entertainment resume in recent years.

Adkins said director Peter Berg “pulled a neat trick to get me to express the rage he wanted me to express. After a couple of takes, Peter came out and came right up to me and started screaming all kinds of obscenities right in my face. It worked. He was just trying to get me angry.”

But Adkins also helped the director add even more realism to that scene — which was filmed in the New Orleans airport hotel where the real-life gathering of Deepwater Horizon family members took place.

“They had one relatively small actors playing one of the BP officials — who was supposed to pull me off of Mark [Wahlberg]. But I told Peter, ‘You better get a second guy — or someone a lot bigger than this guy — to make it look real,” said the 6-foot-six-inch singer-actor. “Well, they got a second guy. And, as you can see in the film, it looks more like what might have happened.”

— Bill Zwecker