The moment that could have saved cinema from Mark Wahlberg: “I was very uninterested”
It’s often very hard to work out if Mark Wahlberg is any good at what he does, because you’ll see him in something like 1997’s Boogie Nights, where he’s excellent, but more often than not, you’ll be watching him in a movie and thinking ‘wait, this is terrible’.
And the latter is definitely becoming the norm, because there is clear evidence that Wahlberg’s films are getting worse and worse by the year, a decline that began around the time that he basically started to play exactly the same character no matter the movie. Regardless of plot, he is a divorced dad from Boston trying to navigate dating while seeing his kids; actually, I’m looking at every film he’s made since 2013, and that’s all he does.
It’s a shame, really, because Wahlberg was in The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s crime thriller opposite Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon, and he was great in that, so much so, he picked up nominations for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ from both the Academy and the Golden Globes. He followed that up with the also very good 2010 David O Russell film The Fighter alongside Christian Bale, and that same year saw him pivot to comedy in Will Ferrell’s The Other Guys, which was a big hit, making almost $200million at the box office.
So what went wrong after that? Well, quite simply Wahlberg seems to have chosen to make bad movie after bad movie ever since, mostly leaving the dramatic roles that served him well behind and either making straight-to-streaming nonsense like the recent Balls Up, which has a premise so appalling that you wonder who paid who to get it greenlit, or more movies with Ferrell that aren’t as good as his first one, plus of course Ferrell is experiencing a massive drop in quality of his own.
We’re at the point where not many people really care whether Wahlberg makes any more movies, and that could well have been the case right from the start due to a couple of pivotal moments. Now, at this stage, I’m going to suggest that anyone reading go back and do a bit of digging into what he got arrested for as a teen, and you can make your own mind up as to how much people have the capacity for change and become a good person.
“I just figured I’d been bullshitting my way through life and lying, and I believed it, and that’s pretty much what they told me acting was about.”
Mark Wahlberg
Then there’s the fact that Wahlberg had a lucky escape to say the least when he was originally booked to travel on American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11th 2001, the first plane to hit the World Trade Centre, but cancelled his ticket. Strangely enough, so was his future Ted co-star Seth Macfarlane, who also cancelled, as was Jaime Pressly, who did the same thing. Either way, through luck or opportunity, Wahlberg has somehow made it unscathed to A-list Hollywood stardom.
Another twist came even earlier than that when he was an underwear model for Calvin Klein in 1993 and was approached by Danny DeVito to audition for a role in a comedy directed by Big’s Penny Marshall called Renaissance Man, a movie about a failed businessman trying to get army recruits to pass their training. Wahlberg didn’t bother to read the script, only turning up because he wanted to meet DeVito and Marshall, eventually learning a couple of pages and going in anyway.
He told The Guardian, “I just figured I’d been bullshitting my way through life and lying, and I believed it, and that’s pretty much what they told me acting was about. We had had some pretty funny conversations about my life and the trouble I was in, so I had to be honest with myself for once and realise that I’d been doing it my whole life anyway. You know, I’d always gotten over the judges and the lawyers and my mother, so I figured I could do it.”
Wahlberg got the part in the movie, but it was absolutely panned, losing tens of millions at the box office, and it currently has a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is still double the rating that his 2022 film Me Time with Kevin Hart has. So, how close did we come to not having to watch Wahlberg acting at all? Very close it seems, and when asked if he’d have tried to become an actor had DeVito not intervened, he added, “No. I was very uninterested. I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t think about it too much”.
