How Mark Wahlberg grew to hate the movie he called his career favourite: “I was pretty awful”
It’s been proven on several occasions that Mark Wahlberg can be a good actor when armed with the right material. The downside is that either that material doesn’t make it onto his desk very often, or he doesn’t seem interested in reading it when there are generic action movies to be made.
His Academy Award-nominated performance in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, a breakthrough turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, or his stellar work opposite Christian Bale in ‘Best Picture’ nominee The Fighter illustrate that there’s a genuinely strong performer in there somewhere underneath that permanently furrowed brow and penchant for mediocrity.
Wahlberg has shouldered his fair share of the blame for the many terrible films he’s made throughout his career, whether it’s copping to the fact that M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening was an embarrassment or acknowledging that Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes was better off remaining lodged in development hell where it had spent the previous decade before its release.
Hindsight remains undefeated in all walks of life, which forced the four-time Razzie nominee to retract his previous statement that Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie was a career highlight. A loose and completely unnecessary remake of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn’s Charade, the film was a disaster.
Barely recouping a tenth of its production budget at the box office and failing to offer so much as a single memorable moment across its 104-minute running time, it’s arguably the single most forgettable feature in Demme’s accomplished filmography. It’s right up there in Wahlberg’s, too, which is saying something when he’s appeared in so much slop.
At the time, he called it the single favourite of all the movies he’d made. While recency bias is definitely a factor, Wahlberg wasn’t quite as forgiving more than a decade later when he came clean and confirmed what anyone unlucky enough to have seen it already knew: the movie was dire.
“There were a few good things about The Truth About Charlie,” he maintained to Yahoo. “I spent four months in Paris. I spent my 30th birthday in Paris. I was introduced to beautiful French cuisine, beautiful Bordeaux’s, and some other beautiful things in Paris.” That’s all well and good, but what about the end product?
“The movie just didn’t turn out the way I hoped,” he said. “I was pretty awful.” He’s right; The Truth About Charlie was awful, and Wahlberg was awful in it. Some actors simply aren’t suited to leading a fleet-footed romantic heist caper, and it was made abundantly clear the Bostonian native fell firmly into that camp.
He’s made worse, which isn’t supposed to be a compliment, but it was nonetheless quite the backtrack for The Truth About Charlie to go from all-time favourite to ‘yep, I sucked in that one’, even if it was entirely correct.
