markrobertwahlberg.com

(NY Daily News – October 2002)

LOS ANGELES — Mark Wahlberg, who was a thug, a rapper and an underwear model before becoming a movie star, says he has no desire for another career change, but if he did …

“My assistant wants me to quit acting so we can go on the PGA tour together,” the 31-year-old says with a laugh. “He wants to be my caddie.”

Wahlberg, an 18 handicapper, will have to stick to acting, but he is no stranger to reinvention. Imprisoned at 17 for assaulting a Vietnamese refugee during a botched liquor-store robbery, he rebounded and found fame in the early ’90s as bad-boy rapper Marky Mark, and later made billboards in his Calvin Kleins.

Penny Marshall gave Wahlberg his first film role, in the 1994 “Renaissance Man,” and Paul Thomas Anderson made him an indie star in “Boogie Nights.” Major roles in two adventure hits — “The Perfect Storm” and “Planet of the Apes” — put him in lights, and Jonathan Demme has now cast him in a role previously played by no less a star than Cary Grant.

The movie is “The Truth About Charlie,” a remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 “Charade,” in which Grant co-starred with Audrey Hepburn.

“This is the hip-hop version,” Wahlberg jokes. “This is by no means a Cary Grant biopic, but if people want to make comparisons and say I’m doing the Cary Grant role, that’s fine.”

Well, he is. Both films are about a young woman named Regina (Thandie Newton, in for Hepburn) who’s caught in the fallout from her larcenous husband’s death. Some men trying to get a stash of stolen money think she has it; they include Joshua (Wahlberg), a mysterious fellow who keeps changing identities. Casting Wahlberg in the caper was somewhat risky, since he has still to prove himself a leading man.

“Mark has built a successful career by being unwilling to let people categorize him,” says E! Online movie columnist Anderson Jones. “The key to his success in film was not letting people think of him as a white rapper — nothing can mean death to a career more than that. He had a little patience, and that has really paid off for him.”

From acting out to acting

The youngest of nine children in a strict Irish Catholic family, Wahlberg spent much of his teen years dealing drugs and picking fights on the streets of Dorchester, Mass., a working-class section of Boston. After dropping out of high school (he later received a GED), the one-time bricklayer turned to a life of petty crime, which landed him in the Deer Island Penitentiary for two months.

“Funny thing is, that’s exactly what I had set out to accomplish,” Wahlberg says. “I wanted to be one of the guys. I wanted to be respected on the streets, have my stripes and have my time under my belt. Then, when I got there, I was like, ‘This is the worst place in the world.’”

The experience behind bars convinced Wahlberg to go another direction, and he credits one Father Flavin, a priest in his old neighborhood, for pointing the way.

“The first time I met him I was 12 years old, and I was standing on a corner at 3 in the morning selling drugs,” Wahlberg recalls. “He has dedicated his entire life to doing God’s work and helping people. Unfortunately, most of us didn’t listen to him until it was too late. A lot of my friends are still in prison.”

(Wahlberg may still have some scrappy instincts. A former bodyguard has filed a suit, saying the actor attacked him last year. Wahlberg’s spokesman had no comment on the suit.)

“One of the things that impressed me most when I met Mark,” says Demme, “was he told me he had done things in his past that he wasn’t proud of. He told me he was devoting his energies in life to responding in a positive way to the bad things he has done.”

The actor recently established a charity, the Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation, which got a gymnasium for Father Flavin’s church and created a teen center for a Boys’ Club in Boston. His older brother, Jim, who spent 10 years in prison, helps run the foundation.

“He has been sober for 17 years and a counselor for 12,” Wahlberg says. “He has made a miraculous change.”

Jim Wahlberg says his brother has the power to change many lives with his own story: “His message is simple — ‘Do the right thing. I didn’t do the right thing, and I paid for it.’ He’s not trying to hammer anybody, and it has an impact.”

The younger Wahlberg, who begins work soon on the British caper film “The Italian Job,” has been rebuilding his relationship with another older brother, Donnie, a former member of the singing group New Kids on the Block and star of the NBC drama “Boomtown.”

“We were kind of involved in business early on, and it had a negative effect on our relationship for a while,” Mark says. “But we have both put that behind us. So we don’t spend much time talking about work. Our conversation is usually more about his family or when I am going to settle down.”

Wahlberg and long-time girlfriend Jordana Brewster broke up soon after he began work last year on “The Truth About Charlie” in Paris.

“I had a relationship of three years, but I was single after a week of being there,” he says. “I fell in love four or five times.”

Wahlberg also made the most of his surroundings while on location.

“One thing about working in France is that you are basically required to drink a bottle of wine at lunch,” he says, laughing. “The French are obviously used to that. But for me, it took a while. I could probably drink two six-packs of beer. But drinking wine during the day … I want to go and lay down and take a nap.”bAD BOY