Film

The Contender

From gang runner to show runner, Mark Wahlberg has always been a scrapper. Whether taking the lead (see Transformers: The Age Of Extinction next month) or as a producer, Boston's troubled blue-collar kid is now Hollywood's heavy hitter. With one Oscar-winner under his belt, cinema's best player-coach is squaring up for another round...
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Peggy Sirota

'You're not the boss of me, Jack. You're not the king of Dirk. I'm the boss of me. I'm the king of me. I'm Dirk Diggler. I'm the star. It's my big dick and I say when we roll!' - Dirk Diggler, Boogie Nights, 1997

Mark Wahlberg is a hustler. He's a bona fide operator. His whole movie-star avatar is rigged to hide in plain sight the interlinking entrepreneurial machine that whirs and pumps unnoticed beneath.

Or rather that's what I'm thinking as I sit in a plush suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills - if not quite the last place you'd think to encounter Mark Wahlberg the film producer and businessman, investor in things ranging from sports beverages (Aquahydrate, an "electrolyte-enhanced, ph9+ supercharged water") to restaurants (the superbly named Wahlburgers), then certainly a little incongruous when you shade it up against the persona projected by Wahlberg the actor, which is rugged, salt-of-the-earth, South Boston to the core.

The man has low-key determination, but the easy grit he projects on screen suggests a paradox. On the charisma scale he's closer to Clint Eastwood than he is to someone like Sean Penn but in his affect he never seems particularly coiled. He's not clenched like Tom Hardy and he's never - unless playing for laughs in comedies such as The Other Guys with Will Ferrell, or

Ted - overly operatic. Wahlberg's voice rarely seems to rise on screen. He's no-nonsense. Often the characters he depicts are flawed then travel through a period of self-doubt to something resembling enlightenment. They're tough but breakable. He burns cool in a way that never seems to strive to be cool.

Yet to be so collected and so successful off screen makes people suspicious. What sort of an operation is he running here? The man has more power plays than Robert Evans. Besides the executive movie money moves, the drinks company, the burger joints and the reality TV shows there's the imminent, juggernauting Transformers: Age Of Extinction, the fourth in the series, out next month. He's just wrapped a remake of 1974's James Caan vehicle The Gambler. No one as diligent as Wahlberg can possibly be as unruffled or as calm as he appears. All that laid-back, swaggering, blue-collar machismo. It must be a put-on. Right? "How ya doin'?" When he enters barely ten minutes behind schedule he seems at ease, in his loose-laced, box-fresh trainers and his plain beige T-shirt, which he wears just fine at 42. He ambles into the suite like there's no hurry, no pressure to sell the hell of out of a multibillion-dollar franchise some critics labelled "an abomination" and "characterless".

There's no amped-up surge of subtle defensiveness or bombastic charm. With Wahlberg there's just a calm, patient authority. He shakes my hand, a little clumsily, with his left, inverting it with an apologetic glance at his right, which hangs by his side looking tender. "What happened?" I enquire. "Boxing." He grimaces then explains that it's an old injury. "Whenever I do the dishes or catch it on the side of my trousers it flares up."

The dishes? The fact that Wahlberg might be found suds up to his elbows, tea towel over one shoulder like LA's answer to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall goes to the heart of the matter. Try to picture Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Tom Cruise, Jason Statham or just about any other action star doing the same without it seeming more than a little comical. Right off the bat, the actor doesn't appear to be posturing at regularity, but seems, quite simply, to possess it, to be what he's always been: the youngest of nine children, born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, to working-class parents, his mother a bank clerk, his father a teamster.

I've got people where positive encouragement works, and others where I have to threaten to crack their head open

Lots of actors come from humble roots, of course, and many retain their sense of regularity, but few seem to have grown into it the way Wahlberg has, from the douchey, boxer-short-flashing homeboy with the big mouth, ripped abs, and one-hit-wonder rap career. As he gets older, and unlike many of his peers, Wahlberg's ability to be a total jerk - aside from the odd rambling appearance on late-night British chat shows - seems to be diminishing.

'I'm 42 years old. I haven't looked in a mirror in ten years. I've got nothing to prove'

Settled in our chairs, refreshments offered, it's straight to business. "Did you see some of the movie?" The actor is referring to Transformers, the reason we're here, of which I had been screened approximately 15 minutes. In it, Wahlberg plays Cade Yeager, a single father of a post-adolescent girl (played by Nicola Peltz) who inadvertently gets the family swept up in the drama of the Transformers' return.

Wahlberg is eager to pick through the scenes. "What'd you think?

Did you see the scene with the short shorts?" Not lost on me and, from the rapidity of his question, not lost on Wahlberg either, is the fact he's playing the sort of part that not long ago would have fallen to someone else, Harrison Ford or Kevin Costner, say. He's playing the "concerned father", in other words, and the scene in question involves him -squaring off against his daughter, clad in those very Michael Bay-approved shorts - mere apostrophes on the long, golden legs of Peltz - and her boyfriend, to whom he does not take an immediate liking. "If Hollywood had its way, normally [in a movie like this] Nicola would play my girlfriend." The actor is keen for us to know he could save the world and still get the girl if he chose to. "But I wanted to embrace the idea of playing older, of playing" - he hesitates a moment - "what will be my reality in the very near future." Wahlberg has four children, two boys (eight and five years old) and two girls (four and ten), with the model Rhea Durham, to whom he's been married for five years. "When I first found out we were having a girl," he says, of the eldest - the one whose impending teen-dom makes playing a man like Cade Yeager less of a stretch than it would've been - "it was a little kick in the stomach. My mother was like, 'That's what you get!'" He laughs. "But it's really been the greatest thing ever, because I have a wonderful relationship with [my daughter], that's helped me in my other relationships and in my relationships with women in general."

Wahlberg isn't using "relationship" here in the vibey, car-pool-syncing, tofu-grilling Hollywood sense, of course, where one is said to have such a thing with one's spirit animal or one's yogi. (One suspects LA is simply a place of work and convenience for Wahlberg, somewhere to flog his premium water, rather than a state of mind.) Does his family life affect his choices as an actor? "I try not to let it," he explains, although he admits that family concerns sometimes do enter into business decisions. "My wife is very particular about what the kids can watch," he says, before telling a story about taking his oldest daughter to Cinema Con earlier this year. They encountered a child - "he couldn't have been more than eleven" - who began singing the "Thunder Song" from 2012's Ted, a movie so riotously obscene that - whatever misgivings Wahlberg may have about letting his own children see it (he plays a bong-hitting, rental-car clerk whose life is largely disrupted by his best friend, a talking teddy bear with a disposition along the lines of Bill Hicks) to most they don't seem unusually conservative. "I have a bit of a double standard," he admits. "My boys, they want to watch everything, but I'm very protective of my girls." A sequel to Ted is yet another thing that's on the deck for Wahlberg.

Family life and stardom, stardom and producer-dom (he's produced a number of HBO shows, including Boardwalk Empire), producer-dom and mogul-hood: is all this about maximising earnings, taking risks, keeping things fresh or just the way a modern movie star must expand the brand nowadays? "Producing helps, actually," he says of his interlinking ventures. "I get to spend more time at home, work from home. There's enough time in the day to do it all and still get eight hours of sleep a night."

No one as diligent as Wahlberg can be as calm as he appears. All that laid-back, swaggering, blue-collar machismo. It must be a put-on. Right?

I push him on this, as it seems an awfully muted answer, not wildly self-examining, especially for one who seems to be so dedicated, a man who you can believe drills down deep into the numbers when he needs to. His movies often require gruelling preparation, whether it's The Gambler, for which he lost 61lb to play a college professor whose addiction runs him afoul of the Mob, or 2013's Pain & Gain, for which he bulked to the size of Popeye to play a money-hungry bodybuilder, or Lone Survivor, for which I would imagine the actual Navy Seals he trained with weren't too concerned about those eight hours of sleep. Does his commitment set him apart or is it just something now required to ensure he's as bankable as the Bradley Coopers or Ryan Goslings of this world? "Everyone's different," he says, still somewhat indirectly. "I know some actors have their whole routine where they don't want anybody around them [on the set], or they need to play music or whatever, but the James Cagney philosophy always made more sense to me. Prepare for the part. Be the part. And with no great effort, play the part." With no great effort? "Sure. There were times on the set of Lone Survivor where I'd be covered in blood, and I'd just be throwing the football around, playing games [before a take], and then the director would yell 'Action!' and I'd do what I do."

Let's take a moment to consider what it is Mark Wahlberg does do on screen. Because it's that ease, that raw-yet-graceful presence that isn't the natural, seemingly innate stardom of a Leonardo DiCaprio, or the preternatural acting chops of a Christian Bale (to name but two co-stars against whom Wahlberg has more than held his own, in 2006's The Departed and 2010's The Fighter, respectively), but a knack that is hard won, fully earned, that allows him surprising versatility.

It's sobering, actually, to think back on his somewhat reluctant beginnings as a movie actor (in 1994's Renaissance Man, a film for which he was pressed to audition by director Penny Marshall; "I told her I didn't want to do it," he recalls," and she said, 'Why not? You're the only actor I've met in your age bracket who talks about Robert Ryan and John Garfield and Edward G Robinson'") and to realise how much ground Wahlberg has covered.

Never mind illustrious co-stars - Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Charlize Theron, Philip Seymour Hoffman - there are also the filmmakers, Martin Scorsese, David O Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, plus James Gray and Antoine Fuqua, Seth MacFarlane and Michael Bay.

He's not just haunting the auteurs' corner, any more than he is operating within the narrow yet challenging confines of being an action star. He's just as good in a beer-bottle comedy like

Ted as he is in a quality potboiler like 2007's

Shooter, and he's positively eye-opening in something like

The Fighter, one of those Oscar-calibre movies in which he's been appearing with more regularity than you'd think for the past decade and a half.

A key element, of course, is preparation. What Wahlberg might lack in finesse or oily charm or, indeed, natural thespy élan, he makes up for with dogged diligence. One can imagine once he's decided to commit to a particular part, once his mind is fixed on it, his jaw locks like a pit bull, if only so he can turn it down on his own terms a little later on.

Leaving aside the physical training rituals, the gain and loss of muscle for various parts that may make even Bale's fabled starvations seem mild, he tells me he reads every script of every film he does out loud, in full, multiple times per day, every day, for six months prior to the shoot, and then continues this ritual all the way through filming.

A movie like Lone Survivor - the true story of a US special-forces unit and their botched yet valiant mission to kill notorious Taliban leader Ahmad Shah - would have been gruelling to shoot, and the nagging physical pains that endure from films like that - "I'm 42 going on 75," the actor says ruefully at one point, glancing down at his bad hand - all testify to the grind. One suspects, in fact, that acting is less like an art form for Wahlberg and more like an endurance sport. Yet when I ask him about working on both Pain & Gain and Transformers with Michael Bay, a director who's known to have something of the sociopathic taskmaster about him (remember the genocidal madman to whom Megan Fox compared the director after her stint in the first

Transformers movie), Wahlberg just nods diplomatically. "Michael knows exactly what he wants and how to get it. I love that. There are no mind games with Michael." As opposed to working with David O Russell? After all, on 2004's

I Heart Huckabees the director's colourful interactions with actress Lily Tomlin are preserved on YouTube for all to see. "Everyone's different," Wahlberg says flatly. "I have an easy working relationship with David. It may have been difficult for others, but it's always easy for me."

At this point, I ask him about his life as an executive producer and about what makes him good at it. After all, many actors try, but few can do it so effectively. "I've got good people skills and I'm a good player-coach. The only way you can succeed is if you have the right people around you."

It's a frustratingly anodyne answer, one that might have been tugged from the pages of some populist business handbook, but the fact remains, producing as Wahlberg practises it - not as a movie star collecting the fee because he can, but as an alert, responsible businessman aware of the budgets and bottom lines - is a job, and not a particularly glamorous one. He may have launched his producing career with a show that was loosely based on his own younger life - Entourage - but in order to produce as widely as he has requires more than "people skills". It takes drive, energy and savage ambition.

'I got tired of waiting for the right project to drop on to my desk. In my business, in my life, if I don't do it, nobody else is going to do it'

I press him again. "I got tired of waiting for the right project to drop on to my desk." Finally a flash of that drive, a little honest heat from within. "If I don't do it, nobody else is going to do it, and if I don't tell everybody how to do it, it's not going to be done the right way." Preparation. Risk assessment. Control. "I've got people where positive encouragement is going to get the best results and other people where I have to threaten to crack their head open."

The actor's voice never rises. That "crack their head open" is figurative - or at least it sounds figurative, delivered with a wry smile and a nod - but it opens a can of worms nevertheless. For all his familial devotion, for all his churchgoing (Wahlberg is a devout Catholic; he's claimed to attend church twice every Sunday) and his community work, he wasn't always so upstanding.

Addicted to cocaine as a young teenager, he sold drugs, had myriad run-ins with the police and - the kicker, really the most troubling bit of Wahlberg arcana - was involved in a set of racial incidents, the harassment of a group of African-American schoolchildren (throwing rocks at them) when he was 15, and the severe beatings of two Vietnamese men a year later. In one of the latter episodes, the victim was permanently blinded in one eye and Wahlberg was arrested for attempted murder and convicted of assault, for which he served 45 days of a two-year prison sentence.

On the one hand he was young, and that sort of ordeal, while never the sort of thing that can be expiated in full, isn't necessarily definitive. One can grow up, as Wahlberg certainly has - let's not forget his brief yet vivid passage in the early Nineties as a bubble-gum rapper and deeply un-musical musician as the leader of Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch - but how much of this recklessness remains? Does he train it all back on himself, or sublimate it into his religious observance? One can't say Wahlberg is reluctant to talk about his past exactly - "I gave up a few bad habits, stopped burning the candle at both ends," he murmurs when I ask him also about the more recent effects of parenthood and family life on his moral development - but he's not wildly illuminating on the topic either.

The pressures of his background have a lot to do with Wahlberg's choices, both as an actor and as a man. When I ask him about 1997's

Boogie Nights, effectively his screen breakthrough - he was excellent in Fear the year before, but playing porn star Dirk Diggler was his first truly adult turn - he goes immediately to his initial reluctance to play the part. "Growing up the way I did, and where I did, you're always worried about what people are going to think," he says. "I read the first 35 pages of Boogie Nights, and it was one of those things where it's very difficult to wrap it in a bow and make it sound appealing to a guy like me. Showgirls had just come out, and I'd come from the whole Calvin Klein [modelling] thing..."

He trails off, and I think for a moment about what "a guy like me" entails. For a tough kid from Boston, the prospect of playing a porn star, and not an idealised one but a dimwitted, intermittently vain Valley boy who slides for a time into gay hustling, must have been a stretch. It must have entailed some discomfort, even fear. "I told my agent, 'Nope. Not doing it.' But then I met with Paul

[Thomas Anderson], and I saw where he was coming from. I fell in love with him immediately."

I think, too, of how different that performance is, even from what came after it. There's an unabashed sweetness, a rare vulnerability involved. Think of how gently Wahlberg's character rejects Philip Seymour Hoffman's gay camera-boom operator, how his Dirk Diggler isn't just a kid with an oversized cock and an inflating ego, but one with just enough of a vanilla soul. "That was a good moment for me," he says. "After that movie I just felt different as an actor. I couldn't have done a movie like

Ted without it." I wonder for a second about the leap from Dirk Diggler to playing opposite a profanity-spitting teddy bear, albeit one who would surely know the Diggler filmography if their worlds were coextensive. "Sure. Just to be able to believe in it, since I had to play so many of those scenes without anybody else there. It helped with [Transformers] too, where a lot of the time I was against somebody off-camera doing the voice, or reading it through a big booming speaker."

When one considers Wahlberg's achievements as an actor, taking in the range of what he's done and the amount of elbow grease he's put into it, it's hard not to consider this last movie as a formidable achievement: injecting a surprising humanity into a CGI-turbo-charged popcorn summer blockbuster that's not much known for being long on feeling. The clips I saw, at least, show just that. Wahlberg's scenes in which he's struggling to protect his daughter are, dare I say it, kind of moving.

As I size the actor up now, having heard from him how fiercely and aggressively he prepares ("I'm always ready to work ten times, 100 times as hard as everybody else on the set, and I'm also always ready to throw my own ideas away and just do what [the director] asks of me," he says at one point), I can only wonder again how it all comes out seeming so effortless.

I ask whether he ever feels vulnerable or foolish when acting a scene. He shrugs and gives me an answer that somehow seems to pull it all together, to carry a rugged intensity, a certain defiance and a good-natured indifference at once. "Look, I'm 42 years old, I haven't looked in a mirror in ten years. I don't give a f*** how I look. If I have to prepare for a part physically, I will, but I've got nothing to prove," he says, grinning. "I'm not trying to impress anybody."

Originally published in the July 2014 edition of British GQ.