“Come HERE!” A gaggle of girls calls from the green across Harbor Loop, their voices blending with the call of hovering gulls, who also seem to be ogling the scene.
Mark Wahlberg steps out of the back door of a shiny black car, in town to flog his new movie, “The Perfect Storm,” and he turns around to face them. “Not now,” he yells in his familiar Dorchester accent, smirking, his hand shading his squinty eyes from the bright sky. “Not now!” Resigned, and maybe relieved, the girls reply in unison: “We love you!”
But the question of the moment regarding Mark Wahlberg is this: Which Mark do they love? Because in his decade of fame and fortune, Wahlberg has been a couple of very different men. He is an actor whom some claim has already been cheated out of an Oscar nomination for “Boogie Nights.” He is a protege and friend of George Clooney, he has made 12 movies (two of them, “Three Kings” and “Boogie Nights,” were critical darlings), and he is doing meetings with Hollywood heavies like Tim Burton about future projects.
His role in “The Perfect Storm” moves him up a peg from the kid-with-promise category to he-could-be-a-star status. As proof, ads for “The Perfect Storm” feature his name alongside Clooney’s, above the title. Today, Mark Wahlberg is Marquee Mark.
More surprisingly, he is also a man who claims to attend church and pray regularly, who rescues friends from the same Dorchester streets that almost led him to a life behind bars, and who says, without betraying a hint of irony, “If I can inspire one person to do something, that’s a huge accomplishment.”
But, as anyone with a magazine subscription or a remote control knows all too well, not many years ago Wahlberg’s image appeared on the other side of the coin. First, he was a flash-in-the-pan rapper named Marky Mark, an accused homophobe and an unrepentant punk who’d spent 45 days in jail at age 16 for a racially tinged assault.
Then, thanks to Calvin Klein, he was an underwear model and a ripped gay icon with a famously airbrushed third nipple. And all along, he was a shock artist who liked to drop his pants onstage, who dedicated the official Marky Mark book to his penis, and who staged a tiff at an L.A. party with fellow underwear aficionado Madonna and her entourage.
In short, he was the Perfect Worm.
Today, overlooking the harbor where he spent a few weeks filming outdoor shots for “The Perfect Storm” last fall, Wahlberg talks about his stormy history both with quiet regret and with the shrewd understanding that it’s the dishiest part of his media profile, that it’s his sales pitch. Publicists often warn interviewers off unattractive topics — and racism, violence, drug abuse, and a vacation at Deer Island certainly qualify as unattractive — but no one has tried to control Wahlberg’s spin during the “Storm” promotion. Truth is, many young actors in Hollywood — the ones who, like Wahlberg, wear scruffy goatees, stringy hair, and loose jeans — would love to add juvenile delinquency and House of Detention to their resumes. Wahlberg’s authentic “street” aura, the sense that he actually stole cars and sold drugs, is precisely what Hollywood casting agents and directors are sniffing around for.
And so the tales of Wahlberg’s illegalities and immoralities trail him. “They keep writing the same article over and over,” he says without much annoyance. “I actually had a talk with the president of one of the studios about it. They were trying to get me to do this interview, this magazine cover, and I said, `Look, I did something for that magazine before and they just wrote the same story. This is their angle.’ And he said, `That’s why you should do it!”‘
What would a more updated Mark Wahlberg story sound like? “It would talk about the obsession with my past,” he says, “and my understanding it, and being OK with it to a certain extent. But not getting off the path of what I’m trying to do as a person, which is to really develop myself, which is to grow and continue to educate myself.
“Every day I wake up and try to make myself a better man.”
In talking about his psychological changes since he put Marky Mark behind him, Wahlberg pulls out stock phrases like “Comes a time when you have to look in the mirror” and “You get to a certain age where you’re supposed to know what right and wrong is.” But, leaning over the tape recorder, his hazel eyes admit no possibility that he’s putting on a performance, or that he’s on the automatic pilot that performers succumb to after doing years of press. He bears a heightened sincerity, and indeed, when the interview is over he says he’ll call later to elaborate on his changes. Unlike most Hollywood players, he follows through on his promise.
“I’ve been very fortunate to get out of Dorchester for a little while to see that that’s not how the rest of the world thinks,” he says. Despite skepticism from friends and colleagues, he goes to church on a regular basis. “I’m trying to make up for all the (expletive) I did. Being raised Catholic is tough, man. I don’t look at my girlfriend in a sexual way too long without feeling guilty and blessing myself” — he crosses himself to illustrate. “It helps me, and I believe.”
On the set of the movie he just filmed, “Metal God,” which is being executive produced by Clooney, Wahlberg’s fellow cast members were surprised by his reverence. “I’m playing a guy who’s thrust into the rock ‘n’ roll spotlight in the ’80s. Lots of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. But once we got off the set, I’m talking about, `God I gotta go to church. Lord forgive me.’ They sit there with this look on their faces, they can’t figure it out.
“That’s just me. Nothing makes me feel better about myself.”
Behind his career, he says, there are larger motives: self-expression and the chance to serve as a role model. “I’m doing all these things to get me where I’m supposed to be. I don’t think it’s on a movie set. I don’t think that’s where I belong. But I think I need to have a big enough voice to get my message across.
“To come from where I come from and accomplish the things I have, to set goals like really going out and educating kids and religion — and God knows all the [expletive] that goes on on the streets today — is not something people expect. I’m not doing it to shock them, either. I just feel like, anything to make me feel better. To do something for somebody makes me feel better.
“Making another couple of million dollars, I don’t want to jump for joy. It puts a smile on my face for a couple of minutes and it’s nice to know that if I want something I can have it, as far as material things. But what I want spiritually, I gotta work for. Every day. I enjoy that work, more than I enjoy my acting.”
Of course, these sober, compassionate, generous, religious thoughts pour out of an actor who mastered his craft not at Juilliard but, as he says, “running around the streets of Dorchester, man, and then sitting in front of the judge telling him it wasn’t me.” He spent his early life pulling fast ones without the benefit of a bulky Hollywood income. He’s good at it.
Wahlberg is a natural actor, and while it may be a challenge to buy his spiritual reformation, audiences have had no trouble accepting his career re-formation. Indeed, he has accomplished a feat that has eluded many a musician longing for acting legitimacy, even Madonna, she of the steely 1980s-style willpower. The reason: Since his first big role in Penny Marshall’s “Renaissance Man,” in 1994, he has delivered very few false moments on screen.
“I realized it was going to be pretty close to impossible,” Wahlberg says about the switch to acting. The fact that he was considered a model after his Calvin campaigns didn’t help: The only thing funnier than a singer in Hollywood is a model with a script. “Everybody just laughed out loud. They laughed in my face.”
“Boogie Nights” in 1997 was the turning point in his acting career. In the company of respected names like Julianne Moore and William H. Macy, he gave a fine central performance as a porn stud. Filmmakers took notice, and soon he was being courted by honchos with action blockbusters in their eyes and $10 million paydays in their wallets. “I love watching action movies,” he says. “But I don’t want to be an action star. I don’t want to be Jean-Claude Van Damme, that’s for sure. He’s a likable guy, but as an actor, that’s not what I want. I have more to offer. . . . I am talking about a kind of big movie right now, but it’s with a very artistic director — Tim Burton.” Burton is remaking “Planet of the Apes.”
Wahlberg says he’s proud of “The Perfect Storm,” and that that makes it easy to talk to the media right now. During the filming, he felt a pressing responsibility to the men who died when the Andrea Gail sank in 1991, as well as to their families and the people of Gloucester, and he says that responsibility was as intense as the role’s great physically demands.
While Clooney was his usual wry, jokey self on the set, he was slightly less buoyant: “When we’re on that boat and we don’t know if we’re going to make it out of that storm, that’s how I felt. George has that ability to snap in and out of it. But I like to stay there and stick it out. . . . I feel better if I’m there all day and when the day is done and the scene is done, I’m OK.”
The music industry hasn’t entirely forgotten about Wahlberg, even if he has been trying to forget about it. The Innerscope label recently approached him with a lucrative offer. “They figure they’ll sell 5 or 10 million records,” he says, “and they’ll get me out there like Will Smith looking like a jackass — not to say that Will Smith is a jackass, but I wouldn’t look good running around in my underwear at this stage of the game. They know that. They’re smart. It doesn’t hurt them to ask.”
While he’s involved in a heavy metal soundtrack for “Metal God,” he says he’ll leave rapping to other guys, like Eminem and Dr. Dre. And what does he think of Eminem, the white rapper who recently released a new album? “It’s a little much at times, but you can’t take away that the kid’s talented. . . . Me, personally, it’s not going to make me go out and do anything, but I know how movies and music have an effect on people and especially kids. So. You know. But everybody’s entitled to do and say what they want.”
And, after all, who knows what the future will bring? In 10 years, Wahlberg may find himself competing for roles with a mellowed musician named Marshall Mathers, who has turned to the art of acting. He used to go by Eminem.
