Mark Wahlberg: The Boogie Man

"Being, to a certain extent, from the world [author] Jim Carroll describes in his book [from which the film was adapted] gave me the position to say, 'Hold on. Why is this guy doing this? He's from Hollywood.' And, him being a great actor, with lots of experience, and the star of the movie, he was like, 'Hold on. We don't want this rapper/underwear model fucking up our beautiful art movie from this classic book.' We both got over it and got along well. I've been on movies where there's this fake, 'I love you,' then you see somebody later and they don't even want to look at you. It just wasn't like that here--it was genuine, and it's still like that today."

I tell Wahlberg I'm stumped by Fear, his 1996 follow-up to The Basketball Diaries. Why play the lead in yet another grade-B, younger Fatal Attraction, even if, as rumored, he got to contribute to the shaping of the project? "I thought [director] Jamie Foley did an amazing job on Glengarry Glen Ross, and, what was the title of that other movie that was great--?" At Close Range, I offer. "Yeah, exactly, and we were really gonna try to do it in a way it hadn't been done before. The opportunity of working with Jamie was huge at that stage of the game."

And what was his contribution to the story overall? "The original idea was about a crew of guys like the Spur Posse who were doing all this messed-up shit. But I thought they were a little bit pathetic and not interesting enough. After three movies, I wasn't a master filmmaker or anything, but there were just certain things I could relate to a little bit more than Jamie could, and obviously there were a lot of things that he knew a lot more about."

Wahlberg strikes me as one of the straighter-talking guys I've met in some time, which is a neat trick for someone who's pretty much grown up in public. Where would he say his head is these days? "I think I'm pretty fortunate to be who I am inside," he asserts. "I'm at a stage where I'm letting it all out. It's the first time I've ever been able to talk about personal feelings, to be honest in personal relationships, to say how I feel without hiding it, without acting cool or like I don't care. I'm just growing up." Staring off for a few moments into the middle distance, he continues. "I used to feel like the cops were watching me all the time."

For a while they probably were. As a teen growing up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, Wahlberg got into scrapes for car theft, rolling drunks, stealing cash boxes from liquor stores, small-time drug dealing and hurling racial epithets. At one point, he served 45 days of jail time. "When you're always watching over your shoulder," Wahlberg continues, "you have that feeling of not being relaxed or comfortable, you know? Of having to watch what you say? It was just becoming such a burden, making me so miserable, I had to let it all out. I talked to certain people I felt I could talk to. And God, when I did, it felt pretty good."

Wahlberg recalls his Christmas visit home last year, when he played Santa to three sisters, five brothers, a retired teamster father, and a mother who'd worked two jobs to help support the family. "For the first time in my life, I didn't just sign my name in the cards," he says, almost in a whisper. "I wrote what I felt. Maybe they just didn't expect it from me, and didn't really read it, but no one said anything." Here Wahlberg seems almost about to weep.

"They respect and understand what I'm doing to a certain extent," he says hoarsely. "They know where I'd be if I'd stayed. Because of the family I have, and because of my strong belief in God, I'd [probably] be doing the right thing now. But if I'd gotten unlucky, I could have easily been like any of my friends, doing life in prison or having huge numbers of kids they don't take care of. Writing those Christmas cards and thinking of all that, of my family, and my nephews and how I hadn't been home in eight months was very emotional for me. I just poured it all out into these cards. I should have said it, not written it, but I didn't want to upset anybody."

One of the strongest incentives for Wahlberg's emotional coming-out seems to be his deepening relationship with his father. "He's had a couple of strokes, so he's not in the best of health," Wahlberg tells me. "Every time I see him, with his family, his grandchildren, he's the happiest guy in the world and the saddest at the same time. My dad never cried. Now he cries all the time. He took me to my first movies, and we still watch Cagney movies together. He said, 'Kid, you made it. You're in the pictures. I always told you you should be in the pictures.' I told him, 'Dad, you're in the pictures, too. I'm you.'"

Before we'd met today, Wahlberg had already taken a meeting about his next movie possibilities, and he's got another lined up for still later in the afternoon. All part of the Wahlberg master plan to leave his notorious former persona behind. "Marky Mark was made into something false and became a character these record company people were selling randomly," he observes. "I was the biggest thing that ever happened to them, and as soon as someone made a decision against what we wanted to do, it all fell apart. Anyway, the whole rap world is at a really negative place now, convincing middle America that these guys are out killing people and admitting it on record. I don't take what they say seriously, but other people obviously do. I listen to Tupac, mesmerized by the way he wrote his own fate, in a way. When he got shot, it seemed so fake and scripted, like, 'OK, this is the ultimate marketing scheme.' When he died, I was devastated."

As Marky becomes a distant memory, how would Wahlberg like to see the future unfold? "After Boogie Nights, it's hard for me to watch anything or want to commit to anything that isn't really wild. I'd really love to work with Martin Scorsese. Those are the movies that I really love. Marty, better give me a call soon. The thing with me is, though, I'm not out to prove anything to anybody other than myself. I've had a huge amount of success and I'd like to make wonderful movies for the rest of my life. If not, hey, growing up where I came from, I've done more than I ever thought I would have accomplished."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Nastassja Kinski for the April issue of Movieline.

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