Mark Wahlberg Is a Hard-Working American Hero
Mark Wahlberg seems to be in good spirits.
He’s in Detroit working, but this weekend, his family — beautiful wife Rhea Durham and four kids (which if you’re counting, definitively qualifies as a brood) — is visiting him. Much, much earlier today, he got his workout in — exercised every muscle group, thank you very much, and then he played a round of golf. After he’s done with me, the Wahlberg Brood will be going to see a movie. His wife bought tickets to Ghostbusters. If Wahlberg has feelings about the choice of film, they are inscrutable.
His wife hovers around him while he answers my questions, making tiny withdrawals from the fund of his attention, small fractions of what is probably owed the spouse of a never-not-working actor/producer/burger tycoon. She is teasing him in that familiar way that never feels as important as it is. She’s flirting, is what she’s doing. Flirting with her husband. Imagine that.
That’s the metaphysics of celebrity, isn’t it? I’m interrupting his normal life, or rather, as a stranger interrupting his day to ask personal questions, I make up his normal, surreal celebrity life. It’s something to remember: when I speak to Mark Wahlberg, it’s unremarkable for him, as life changing as customizing a burger at Applebee’s. But to me, or to the imagined waiter taking his burger order, it is The Time I Talk to Mark Wahlberg. That is to say, if you ever need a lesson in power dynamics, have a chat with Mark Wahlberg.
This isn’t a bad thing. Wahlberg belongs to that dwindling breed of men who can’t not be exactly who they are, as though they are genetically and spiritually immune to pretension, the putting on of airs, and disingenuousness. “I don’t spend a lot of time wondering if I look cool or not,” he says. “I don’t have to worry about how I am being perceived. Obviously, when I was younger, it was more important to me to be perceived, especially by guys in my neighbourhood, as being cool. But I just want to be realistic. If that calls for being vulnerable, I don’t mind being vulnerable.”
Mark Wahlberg will always be, can never not be, Mark Wahlberg. Even on screen, his characters have a Wahlbergian core: they seem decent, genuine, sometimes vulnerable, slightly bewildered that the world isn’t as decent or as genuine as they are. You have famous people who will, metaphorically, prepare a robust dinner for you, fattening you up, so you walk away from the conversation plump, proud, and gratified. But Wahlberg is the kind of host who points you toward his fridge and tells you to make yourself home. And you do. Because if he didn’t mean it, he wouldn’t have told you to, and so everything is relaxed and cool.
…
I worry I’m saying this wrong. So let me be clear: I don’t think Mark Wahlberg thinks he’s better than me. I think, at least in situations like these (the unavoidable awkwardness of celebrity profile interviews), he’s more like an athlete than an actor. He understands that being questioned by strangers is a tolerable part of the job, but that conversation is not the same as friendship. And in the same way that sports journalists will never truly understand what it feels like to be a professional athlete — the pressure, the angst, the reality of living inside a body that just works so much better than most people’s — Wahlberg probably knows, whether he’s thought of it or not, that I’m not going to understand him by asking questions he’s already heard hundreds of times before.
It’s an assessment of Wahlberg that the director Peter Berg seems to agree with, quietly “mhmm-ing” my athlete theory. Before Deepwater Horizon, the film about the BP oil spill, and more specifically about the 11 rig workers who died when the disaster happened — the personal cost that was (understandably) overshadowed by the story of the environmental cost — Berg and Wahlberg worked together on the war drama Lone Survivor. They’ve already filmed their third movie together, Patriot’s Day, about the Boston Marathon bombing, and they have another film together that starts filming in the spring. But even before their professional relationship, when Peter Berg was primarily an actor, the two used to train together with the man who inspired Drama on Entourage.
Only, talking to Berg — who steps out of the editing booth he’s working in to chat with me — you understand why the two are friends, or at least you understand without him having to explain that they are friends. They talk in the same prototypically masculine way, as if talking is kind of redundant, like everything you would want to know is already obvious. Example: Since I know Berg likes to box, and I know from Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s video for “Good Vibrations” (not to mention roles in films like The Fighter) that Wahlberg can handle himself in the ring, I ask Berg if he and Mark have ever gone a few rounds with each other. He tells me that they’ve only fought once. On an airplane. And that Wahlberg got the better of him, but next time will be different. This is a story that begs for elaboration, so I press him for details. “That’s a story for another time,” Berg says, and moves the conversation along. Here’s another authentic American Man, focused on his job, tolerating distractions the same way your dad did when you called him at work during summer vacations he didn’t get to take.
I ask him about heroes — how so many of his movies, including and especially Deepwater Horizon, are about regular men pushed by circumstance to perform heroic feats of sacrifice and survival. Berg tells me that anyone who wakes up early and is dedicated to their work is worthy of more admiration than they probably get, whether it’s a busboy at a restaurant or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. “That’s why I respect Mark Wahlberg so much.” He says. “Incredible work ethic. Disciplined. Smart. Just a great guy. All around really solid individual,” essentially repeating Wahlberg’s assessment of his work ethic, but also validating it.
With all this talk about work, it’s nice to hear Wahlberg talk to his wife. It’s nice to hear that he’s going to the same movie I saw the night before. To hear him sound like a regular husband and, by extension, father. He sounds genuinely happy, in that way tough men sound content without sounding effusive.
You come away understanding the reality of celebrity power dynamics, sure, but you also walk away understanding that Mark Wahlberg is pretty damn cool. You get that you aren’t his friend, but you want to be. Maybe you’ll go see his movie, to hang out with him some more.
…
The contours of Wahlberg’s personal history and career have been well detailed, but for context’s sake, a little repetition never hurt anyone. Besides, while Hollywood is full of surprising origin stories — pro football wannabes turning into wrestlers that morph into bankable stars, stand-up comedians transitioning into dependable dramatic forces, art directors ditching their careers to become unforgettable character actors — Wahlberg’s might be one of the most surprising, even if his present success makes his rise and career seem inevitable.
He was once just the kid brother of Donnie Wahlberg, New Kids on the Block’s resident bad boy, who parlayed that connection into a blessedly brief rap career and a high-profile modelling gig for Calvin Klein’s blessed briefs. The punchline-ready work, which on the surface maybe seemed to imply that Mark Wahlberg was a bit of an entitled lunkhead, belied a childhood full of serious challenges. The Wahlbergs, with their nine kids (Mark is the youngest), didn’t have much money. Mark got mixed up in drugs and petty, if still violent, crime. Then, after the rapping, and inevitable fitness video (inevitable because have you seen this guy?), Wahlberg turned to acting. And damn it if he wasn’t pretty good at it. A few small, superficial roles led to his breakthrough: sweet and desperate Dirk Diggler, the superhumanly-endowed pornstar at the centre of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights.
That could have been a one-off. A flash of talent that Wahlberg couldn’t build on. But instead it was an arrival. He could do action, drama, and still kill in comedies. And then, with that success, he turned his attention to business endeavours: producing his own projects (like the shows Entourage and Boardwalk Empire), and investing in food and beverage ventures, like his brother’s Wahlburgers restaurant chain.
“Listen,” he says in a way that feels like he’s said what follows several times before, “I would never put my name on a restaurant or anything like that if I didn’t have complete, utter faith in my brother and his talent. I said if we are going to do it, then we are going to really do it, like pass it down to future generations and have connections to resources to really grow the business.”
It’s kind of crazy when you think about it, like trying to imagine Justin Bieber, once he learns how to string together a coherent series of sentences longer than a tweet, becoming an Oscar-nominated actor and business tycoon. Impossible. Young stars like the kind Mark Wahlberg was when he first became famous are more products than people, engines of profit for the people selling them. Along with fat paycheques, they’re given fame as payment, but only for as long as the people holding the strings are in control. That’s the typical bargain. But then, somewhere along the line, through hard work and talent, and surprising smarts Mark Wahlberg threw out that deal, and started writing his own.
One of the interesting things about the stars who seem as though they started acting because they were too handsome to do anything else is watching the ones with real talent find that talent and build on it. These are the actors who didn’t come from an acting school or have Sam Shepard as their adolescent hero. Channing Tatum is a recent example, but Wahlberg might be their patron saint.
“When do you think you became a good actor?” I ask him.
“When I faced a judge for the first time,” he says. It’s a good one-liner, and comes as quickly as if it were a vaudeville show. “I’ve always certainly committed to convincing people of what I wanted to convince them of. But I think I’ve never had a problem doing what I needed to do to prepare.”
Here, his wife interrupts him, calling him a workaholic, needling him about how he’s even working (that is to say, talking to me) on Sunday — “Even the day of the Lord’s rest!” she says.
It is a perfectly Wahlbergian answer though, at once light on details, and predictably on brand, but still somehow true and complete. Like, when you approach your work from this working class mindset, there isn’t much else to say. If you’re the type of person who tries to glean something about the actor by the roles he takes, you’ll come away with the same sense of Mark Wahlberg. “I certainly like the ordinary man being challenged and pushed to do extraordinary things to survive or to help his fellow man,” he explained. It checks out, both on and off screen.
You succeed at your work by doing your work, and you do your work by doing the work it takes to do your work. It’s circular, sure, but come on, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.
Mark Wahlberg gets it.
