There’s probably no one else on screen today who can stare the way Mark Wahlberg stares. His eyes are hooded, and his smoky green irises alternately mischievous and watchful. He’s not angry or insolent, but he apparently feels no need to fill up dead air — or uncomfortable silence — with noise or motion or polite chitchat.
The 30-year-old actor is leaning back in a booth at the Palm, the West Hollywood steak joint, having just finished lunch at 5. At 5 feet 7 inches, he’s technically pocket-sized, but his well-defined muscles seem to strain against the shimmery light blue fabric of a freshly pressed button-down shirt. Around his neck to his chest snakes a tattoo of a rosary, which has almost always been airbrushed out of his photos and films. He put it there almost seven years ago in the lull between his old career as a rapper-model and his new life as an actor, because “I kept losing my rosary beads.” They’re like a promise — a promise to be good that he needed to etch into his skin.
Recessive and magnetic
In person, Wahlberg manages to be both recessive and magnetic at once.
“He doesn’t give out a huge amount. It makes you go to him,” says actress Thandie Newton, his latest co-star. His voice is low and sandpapery, the kind you have to strain to hear. Almost every trace of the broad Boston tones of his youth has been carefully polished, except for a few stray vowels that hint at his rough origins. Even his famous physique — now about 186 pounds — is a product of willpower, and he can make it fluctuate 40 pounds in either direction.
If his early career — the Marky Mark rapper through the Calvin Klein underwear-model phase — was about mass-marketing a kind of cartoonish masculinity for middle-class consumption, then this, the second phase, surprisingly hinges on the fact that Wahlberg is one of the few young actors who actually appears to be thinking on screen. Calm on the outside, churning on the inside.
“I had dinner with Mark a couple of weeks ago in London,” recalls “Planet of the Apes” producer Richard Zanuck. “We talked a lot about Steve McQueen. He loves him. He knows every frame of footage that he ever shot. He idolizes him.” When Zanuck headed Twentieth Century Fox, he made “The Sand Pebbles” with McQueen in the ’60s. “I told him, `You remind me both as a person and as an actor of McQueen.’ He’s strong, silent, a few-words-says-it-all type of guy.”
A fan of old movies
It must have been flattering for Wahlberg. As a kid, when he wasn’t devoting himself to trouble or girls, he used to watch movies, “but old movies, Cagney movies. I watched a lot of westerns with my dad. Everything with either Steve McQueen or John Garfield, then a lot of ’70s movies, but mostly Cagney,” Wahlberg says, uncannily picking out his artistic forefathers.
“I’m a fan of old movies and old Hollywood,” he says. “The movie business I’m in is not like what it used to be. I’m not excited to be in the movie business like I would be if it were the ’50s or the ’60s.”
It’s been almost that long since there’s been a blue-collar star like Cagney or Garfield.
Wahlberg seems to emerge from a very specific time, place and economic class rather than the unreal ether of a classless America. His streetwise mix of aggression, naivete and sadness has provided great fodder for such directing talents as James Gray (“The Yards”), David O. Russell (“Three Kings”) and Paul Thomas Anderson, who notably cast Wahlberg as striving naif Dirk Diggler in his star-making porn epic, “Boogie Nights.” Wahlberg has only one guiding principle: The director rules.
“My loyalty lies to the filmmaker, only the filmmaker,” he says. “Not the producer, not the studio. The filmmaker. That’s who I am there with. That’s who I’m going to live with and die with, and I’d go anywhere for. If I commit, I commit. Any filmmaker I’ve ever worked with will tell you that.
“The business I don’t really have too much time for and I’m not that interested in. I think when I get interested in that, it’s going to affect my work and the decision-making process. I’m not doing these other movies where you get paid a lot of money but you’re working with some (expletive) video director, and it’s a piece of (expletive).
“A lot of people think I’ve had an interesting career because of the choices I’ve made. It’s a simple formula. I just want to stick with it.”
It’s at this moment that big Hollywood has come to cash in, casting him in more classic leading-man roles — such as the human who must save mankind in director Tim Burton’s $100-million remake of the 1968 hit “Planet of the Apes,” as well as “The Truth About Charlie,” a big-budget remake of the 1963 Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn romance “Charade,” directed by Jonathan Demme. Newton has the Hepburn role, while Wahlberg put on Grant’s shoes. He learned to speak fluent-sounding French and tango for the role.
“Tim and Jonathan are artists,” Wahlberg says. “I don’t think they ever want to make a movie because it’s going to make a lot of money. They want to make a movie that’s cool and different and original. It doesn’t matter the size of the budget.”
It’s 11 a.m., in the lobby of the Wilshire Boulevard building where Wahlberg’s renting Milton Berle’s condo. He’s decked out in an expensive black suit, which hangs baggily when he stands, but bunches up uncomfortably around his biceps when he sits. A stylist with long blond hair keeps rearranging the pants folds around his crotch — a level of attentiveness that amuses Wahlberg, who grins. When the camera starts clicking, he tosses off effortless smiles and bedroom eyes and a kind of deliciously illicit exhaustion.
A busy schedule
When the photographer is finished, Wahlberg still seems tired, but not that kind of happy tired. More drained and soul-exhausted — after three films back to back. Before “Planet of the Apes,” there was “Rock Star,” which is scheduled for release in September, meaning that for months he was working almost every weekend, either filming or looping or preparing for another part. Outside, a black limo awaits. In an hour, his flight leaves for New York, where he has business he doesn’t want to discuss, and after that, he gets a six-week vacation. “I’ll probably be bored to tears,” he says. “I’ve never had that much time to myself.”
In an interview situation, Wahlberg provides a testimonial to each of his parents at least once every 30 minutes, and indeed has embellished his shoulders with each of their names (along with a Bob Marley tattoo and a tattoo of Sylvester the Cat that covers up a gang symbol he and friends applied themselves at the age of 12).
His parents’ separation was perhaps the most wrenching cataclysm of his young life. Not that the rest was particularly easy. His father drove a truck and then a bus; his mother worked as a nurse’s aide. Wahlberg is the youngest of nine children who lived in a two-bedroom apartment in one of the most racially mixed neighborhoods in Boston, a caldron of racial animosity. During the rage-filled Boston busing crisis of the 1970s, he was one of the kids who was bused an hour and a half away to a predominantly black school in the Roxbury area, until he dropped out in 9th grade.
In happier days
Asked for a happy memory, he smirks. “My memories of a boy. Being 12 or something, driving to Maine with my mom. This is when my mom had remarried a guy from Maine, my stepdad.” He stops, then admits he’s kidding. “It wasn’t a really fun time. I wanted to be at home with my friends in the neighborhood.”
Even as a kid, he ran with grown men. His brothers first got him high on beer when he was 10, and by his early teens he had a serious cocaine problem. This was accompanied by wildness — stealing, selling drugs and getting into fights.
Today, Wahlberg doesn’t want to go into specifics but simply sums up the time under the rubric of misplaced desire: “It was about getting what I felt I needed and wanted. Not having money. Wearing what my brother wore the year before. If you want to go out there and get it, you could. I wasn’t scared of much. If you don’t have anything, you don’t feel like you have much to lose.”
It culminated in a PCP-induced rampage, in which Wahlberg and friends robbed a pharmacy, then tried to take a case of beer off a Vietnamese refugee as he emerged from his car. Sixteen-year-old Wahlberg swung a metal pole and took out the man’s eye. He received a two-year sentence and spent 45 days in the Deer Island Prison in Boston Harbor.
Wahlberg is perfectly aware that the description of “con man” has been attached to his name, and it seems to give him a kind of jaunty pleasure, as if street survival skills — particularly important if you’re the youngest and smallest — have proved useful.
He’s had no formal acting training. “When people ask me if I studied, I say I spent 20 weeks at the Penny Marshall school of acting,” he says with a laugh, acknowledging the director’s idiosyncratic, performance-driven style.
She recalls seeing the crowd’s ecstatic reaction to Wahlberg at a Calvin Klein event at the Hollywood Bowl. “I said, `Who’s he?”‘ says Marshall, who called him in to audition for “Renaissance Man.” The 1994 movie, starring Danny DeVito, was about an ex-adman who winds up teaching basic English to Army recruits. Wahlberg “talked like a regular person when he was reading. He wasn’t talking like he was out of Juilliard, and we didn’t want Juilliard. He didn’t come with an entourage. I don’t care what they’ve done before. I just asked him, `Do you want to be Marky Mark or Mark Wahlberg?’ Mark Wahlberg, fine.”
At Marshall’s request, Wahlberg wrote the rap based on “Hamlet” — performed at the end of the movie. “I think he read the classic comic book,” she says.
“She talked me into wanting the part. I just wanted to meet them. I was a big fan of Penny and Danny,” Wahlberg says. “I had met a lot of people who’d wanted me to play the white rapper in this movie, the bully in that movie, the skateboard guy. I wasn’t interested. They were just so much different in their approach and their personality.”
Other roles followed: as Leonardo DiCaprio’s thuggish best friend in the arty “Basketball Diaries.”
A sadness appeal
Sadness so far has played a crucial element in Wahlberg’s appeal: not flashy, Oscar-hungry pyrotechnics, but soft, weathered sadness, like dull rain on a rooftop, the kind of elemental hurt that calls out for the touch of a woman.
Perhaps this is nowhere more apparent than in “The Yards” (2000), a film suffused with shame and regret, about a broken-down guy, returning from prison, where he alone of a crew of close-knit friends went down for a crime they all committed. It’s about his struggle to be good.
Director James Gray says the film was “autobiographical” for Wahlberg, from the close-knit relationship between the character and his mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, to the “incarcerated guy who comes back home. In a way, he directed the opening party where he’s returning from jail. We would talk about it so much. The opening had to be awkward. His embarrassment is horrifying. The shame involved. He knew exactly what to do there.”
Being a father
As to his personal life, Wahlberg says he would like to have kids. “I was home with my nieces and nephews. What I wouldn’t do to have a couple of those,” he says wistfully. “Hopefully soon.
“I’m not with anybody right now, so the only way that could happen is if I adopted. I don’t want to do that. I want to have nine or 10 of my own. I’d take as many as I could get.”
Who knows if any of this is real, but the delivery is effective, and winning. The only certainty in his future is a plan to make more movies. He has lined up one apiece with Russell, Anderson and Gray. The scripts aren’t even ready, and Russell, scheduled to go first, is still weighing two options. “I’m game for either,” he says. “They know me. They know what I’m capable of and what I’m willing to do for them as an actor.”
Anything?
He finally smiles.
“As long as I don’t have to hurt anybody.”
