“Make sure that that’s the end of that”: when Mark Wahlberg got on the wrong side of Jack Nicholson
Common sense should dictate that the majority of actors would go out of their way to ensure they didn’t piss off Jack Nicholson when they were granted the opportunity to work alongside a legend of cinema, but Mark Wahlberg ended up coming perilously close to making an enemy of the icon.
The three-time Academy Award winner was one of the most respected veterans in the business and an inspiration to many thespians who followed in his wake. Not to be too rude about it, but he could act circles around Wahlberg without even having to try too hard, but the spirit of collaboration fostered on their one picture together almost backfired spectacularly.
Having spent decades immersing himself in complex characters, Nicholson used his twilight years in front of the camera to take things a little easier. He wasn’t phoning it in – far from it – but the star admitted that he’d grown so dismayed by the constant darkness of his performances that he made a concerted effort to stick almost exclusively to comedy in the lead-in to his retirement.
The one outlier among the six films he made between 2002’s About Schmidt and 2012’s How Do You Know was Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, the sole outlier among the sextet that couldn’t be quantified as a comedy. It was definitely funny at points, and Nicholson’s unhinged Frank Costello was a huge part of it, but the hard-boiled crime thriller remains the only overtly non-comedic outing of his latter years.
Wahlberg was on career-best form as police sergeant Sean Dignam, with his creatively worded insults offering a foul-mouthed counterpoint to Martin Sheen’s stoic captain Charlie Queenan, landing the former Funky Bunch frontman the first Oscar nomination of his career for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
Scorsese encouraged Wahlberg to inject more of himself into the character by improvising many of his tirades, which almost backfired after the director was forced to step in and act as the mediator when the sparks flying between the two performers began hitting a touch too close to home.
“I was improvising throughout the movie, and my character, obviously, didn’t have nice things to say about anybody,” Wahlberg admitted to Jake Hamilton. “So, I said some unpleasantries to Jack and he gave me a look that nobody else gave me.”
Being given the death stare by one of Hollywood’s most famously steely-eyed icons would be enough to strike terror directly into the heart of most actors, but Wahlberg wouldn’t be cowed. Instead, he continued his off-the-cuff verbal eviscerations until Scorsese politely informed him that enough was enough.
“And of course, Marty, you know, I did one more,” he explained. “And then they both had a little chat, and then they said, ‘Make sure that’s the end of that.'” Wahlberg had gotten his shots in, but at Scorsese and Nicholson’s insistence, he was best served to wind his neck in on the next batch of takes just in case the tension boiled over.
