“It’s always weird”: why Mark Wahlberg doesn’t want to be remembered for ‘Boogie Nights’
Mark Wahlberg has plenty to be grateful for in his career, especially considering where it all began. As a teenager in Boston, he had multiple run-ins with the law—most notably for racially motivated attacks on Black and Asian strangers. At 16, he was arrested and convicted of assault and battery but served only a month and a half in jail. At the same time, he was building an unlikely career as a rapper under the name Marky Mark. It proved to be a surprisingly fruitful path, but he soon took a detour when Calvin Klein came calling, launching a brief side hustle as an underwear model.
At this stage, Wahlberg had clearly already won the lottery, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that he truly struck gold. Shortly after deciding to transition into acting, he was offered the fortuitous mentorship of Danny Devito on the set of Renaissance Man in 1994. He then had a contentious relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of 1995’s The Basketball Diaries, but it didn’t stop him from winning the role of a lifetime when Paul Thomas Anderson cast him as high school drop-out Eddie Adams (professional name Dirk Diggler) in the 1997 film Boogie Nights.
Set in the 1970s, Boogie Nights is a love letter of sorts to the golden age of pornography. Featuring a stellar cast including Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, it was showered with near-universal acclaim and earned three Oscar nominations. Reynolds went on to win a Golden Globe for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his performance as an adult film director.
It turns out that playing a porn star has its downsides. Wahlberg has repeatedly voiced his ambivalence—and, at times, outright regret—over his role in the film as a young stud with an unusually large penis. In some interviews, he has said he wishes he hadn’t made the film at all. In others, he simply reflects on the challenges it has brought him over the years.
In a 2001 conversation with Phase9 Entertainment, the actor struck a diplomatic tone. “It’s one of those movies,” he said, nonspecifically. “I say, ‘It’s not the one I want to be remembered for.’” That said, he acknowledged that he was “very proud” of it and accepted that it changed his life, though not necessarily in a good way.
“It’s always weird when guys follow you in the bathroom and try and check you out [mimes leaning over and taking a furtive sideways glance at a urinal]. It’s like, ‘Come on guys, give me a break!’”
As far as reputations go, it’s probably not the worst one a guy could have, and based on the rest of Wahlberg’s filmography, he would do well to be remembered for Boogie Nights. He’s had a few bright spots in his filmography in the subsequent decades, including Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and David O Russell’s The Fighter, but for the most part, he’s just been picking up paychecks or championing projects that are significantly more embarrassing than anything he had to do in Boogie Nights.
