Mark Wahlberg: The Boogie Man

With each movie he makes, Mark Wahlberg pushes his old Marky Mark persona further away from him. With his new film, Boogie Nights, a black comedy about the porn world of the '70s, he'd like to prove once and for all that he's an actor.

_______________________________________

Here's how one of Hollywood's top casting directors describes Mark Wahlberg: "Where other kids come in all actory and full of poses, he's real, raw, unguarded. Right away, he showed the ambition and the huevos to be a real screen presence." Here's how Paul Thomas Anderson, the hot young writer/director of Boogie Nights, a black comedy about the adult film industry in which Wahlberg's huevos--and pretty much everything else--are in plain view, describes Wahlberg: "Forget the Marky Mark shit, forget the underwear shit, that's boring and old. This is a fucking great, Sean Penn-type performance. Nothing against Leonardo DiCaprio, who was almost in this movie, but Mark is better than Leonardo would have been. It's clear Mark will do anything in a movie. He's not a movie star, because movie stars are usually embarrassed. He's an actor. He's going to get great scripts now. Great directors are going to want to work with him."

I'm talking to the ex-rapper, ex-rude-boy-underwear-model over lunch on a terrace at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons, and here's how I'd describe Wahlberg: he's a guy who's been many things, and led many lives. He can look and sound from one moment to the next like an altar boy, a thug, a con artist, a sweetie pie, a babe in the woods, a soul-weary roue. Today he's scrubbed, groomed and elegant in dark slacks and a crisp white shirt. But under the shirt you can still catch a glimpse of a tattoo in a rosary bead design. Bottom line is, on-screen and off, everything about Wahlberg smacks of what he's been and done. That's the linchpin of his strength, and he seems to know it. When everyone here defers to him as "Mr. Wahlberg," he breaks out in an infectious "ain't-life-grand?" grin.

In view of Wahlberg's screen career to date, particularly the positive critical reception he got for The Basketball Diaries, I ask why he chose to do a movie from which it must have seemed he could easily emerge as the male Elizabeth Berkley, instead of the daring, serious actor he wants to prove himself to be. He says, so quietly I lean in to catch it all:

"When I read this script, I was like, 'Either they're going to make me the underwear-boy-embarrassment-most-pathetic-piece-of-shit-in-the-world, or this movie is going to be brilliant.' I wanted to be good in a good movie. I wanted to do something totally different, to prove to people that, in the right situation, I can act. I've gotta play different parts or I might as well just get on a TV show. This felt like a movie that the filmmakers were going to make because they felt it should be made. And why I love it so much is that I believe in it, too. Somebody could tell me it's the worst thing in the world and I'd be like, 'What are you talking about?' I don't really care what anybody else thinks."

Whatever people make of the movie, and reactions are likely to be all over the place, Wahlberg has indeed worked with some real-deal actors here, performers the director praises as "motherfuckers, scene-stealers." They include Julianne Moore as a porno movie queen, Don Cheadle as a porno party-hopper, Burt Reynolds as a porno movie director and up-and-coming Heather Graham as a porno movie Lolita on roller skates. How was he treated? "I've had to win over the actors on every movie I've been on," he tells me. "The better actors I'm starting to work with are definitely like, 'What's this kid doing here?' That's just the nature of the game. These people are very on-their-toes. But I grew up getting that look from people, that whole confrontation thing. Everyone on the film was really considerate of me, but they were always waiting to see why I got the part. Once that was out of the way, it was a really nice feeling to be accepted by people I respect so much. Some of them thought I was shy because I'm quiet. It wasn't that. I was studying them, learning from them. I was paying attention."

So, how did Wahlberg, who tells me he's never studied acting and is wary of ever doing so, get ready for this? "I started smoking as much as possible," he says wryly, firing up the first of what will be umpteen lights. "I wanted to change the way I looked, so I stopped eating, too. I lost 40 pounds. When my mother came from back East to see me she thought I was, like, on my deathbed. I go, 'Maaa, it's a movie, you know?'"

In addition to getting a realistic wasted look going, Wahlberg visited the set of an adult film to pick up the vibe and details. "You know what? I just wanted to get the hell out of there as soon as I could. I still believe sex is a very private thing. But in the 70s, sex was the most open thing--everybody was having sex with everybody. The whole idea of people trying to make real movies but having sex in them--sex being what everybody was thinking about--was something that interested me."

Sex being to him a private thing, did he experience any qualms about having a film crew watch him and Julianne Moore hump and grind skin-to-skin? "I saw Julianne as I would have seen my sister, just the warmest, nicest person in the world. It was not a problem clinging to her. The weird thing was the couple of scenes where we had to portray intimacy--it was awkward. But everybody was just so professional, it was a relief."

How about the bit in which Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing a sweet, unctuous hanger-on in the skin trade, plants a drunken kiss on Wahlberg? "I would kiss Phil Hoffman any day of the week, any day," Wahlberg smiles. And the bit in an early cut of the movie where his own character whips out his jaw-dropping love gun for all the world to see? Anticipating the question, Wahlberg makes it clear that the gun in question belongs only to his character. "Dirk Diggler is a very well-endowed young man," he says dryly. "And the thing about me," he continues, "is, well, people have seen me in my underwear before. I would imagine it would be pretty difficult to hide something like that." True, but won't folks who consider him a sex icon be disappointed that he was prosthetically enhanced? "I have hopes that I will meet, or I may have already met, in fact I may already be in love with, the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. So I don't have to worry about people being disappointed."

He adds, grinning, "Now, I may get followed to the bathroom a couple of times, sure."

So did anything rattle Wahlberg on this picture? "There was some quirky porn stuff I just couldn't do and the director was, like, 'Come on, man, this is the best stuff,' and I'm like, 'I just can't, man.' Coming out wearing nothing but Speedos and cowboy boots was kind of hard. But then it got so I started walking around the streets like that, I was just so into it by that time. It was my ass, literally, so I thought, why not just go for it? This isn't your regular feel-good movie. There's no play for sympathy here like The People vs. Larry Flynt. At the end of the day, though, I had to admit to myself, 'Being out there like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy is a bag you're going to carry for a long, long time.'"

OK. Time to backtrack a little and let movie talk wait a while. Did I hear Wahlberg, Internet pinup icon and once the object of screaming-girl-fan attention, actually admit he's seeing someone seriously? Is his love-of-a-lifetime in the entertainment business?

Wildly shaking his head in the negative, he explains, "I don't think there's too many people in the business interested in getting to know anybody. Everybody has their own agenda. I want some¬one who wants the same thing I do: a strong, family-oriented lifestyle." And what about his gay following, some of whom have, alternately, claimed him as well as accused him in the past of making homophobic remarks and appearing with anti-gay lyricspouting rapper Shabba Ranks? Is he once and for all saying he could never be gay?

Pages: 1 2 3