From GQ July 2000:

Somebody up there likes me

He rapped. He took the rap. He did the time. Now his time has come. The surprise isn't that a Dorchester street punk is standing so tall. It's that he's standing at all. By Peter Richmond.

As the sword boat diesels its way down the channel, it must certainly be chafing beneath its curious cargo.

She was christened the Lady Grace. Her iron hull is stained by mossy spots of rust, and there’s a ragged feel of her wheelhouse. The rungs of her ladders are worn by the palms of hard-luck fishermen past, and a deep scent, of oil and something more raw, hovers in her joints and corners.

But on this day a different name has been painted on her stern. On this day, she’s a pretender, and everything about her speaks of artifice, from the cameras crowding her deck to the chirp of a cell phone interrupting the caw of the gulls, to Clooney the matinee man dressed in a studiously stained flannel shirt, turning his perfectly salt-and-peppered chin to the wind.

The only thing that feels authentic here, as the engines grow louder and the boat’s prow begins to split the sea, is the kid standing on the stern wearing the yellow slicker. A vaguely menacing adolescent beard scraggles its way across his chin. A rosary-bead tattoo encircles his neck. He cups a cigarette in his hand as he stares straight ahead, mulling the ironies: how the closest he ever got to the ocean in the old days was sitting on the bridge in Dorchester, watching the fancy boats pass beneath him. Others were tempted by the sight of the yachts’ slickly stained decks below, tempted to jump. Not him. Not after one kid he knew broke his neck.

It’s not only the costume of the itinerant fisherman, or the look, that Mark wears so well. The town sliding away behind us is Gloucester, Massachusetts, a roughhewn place up the coast from his home turf. While he was researching his role, he lived above a waterside bar here, hanging and thinking with the locals down below. A friend of his who came up to visit on the set fit in so well he ended up staying on in town and taking work on a boat himself. A real boat. Now Mark, too, is headed to sea, perfectly at ease on the back of a rocking sword boat.

Whether he’ll be as convincing on a couple thousand Dolby’s screens in a movie starring a big wave and a perfect storm - that is, whether he’s a fine actor - this we don’t yet know. Whether he’s up there on those screens because Hollywood grew so sick of pretty boys that it wanted to get off on a cute piece of rough trade, or whether he’s real and original - whether there’s some James Dean here by way of Presley - is still uncertain.

But that he seduced us in a very short time in the movies, this is undeniable, and that his old life has something to do with the seduction, this is undeniable, too. The edges where the two lives of Mark Wahlberg overlap: That’s where you’ll find the rub and spark of this career.

Put him where he doesn’t belong - say, in a crowded sushi place just off La Cienega 3,000 miles away, where the swing soundtrack is as annoying as the sneer of the valets - and he strikes a conspicuous figure indeed. In a sea of black on black, the tails of his flannel shirt poke out from under a sweater with holes in it. It’s a modern-day Fagin-kid look designed to make people at the bar turn around and wonder if the kid has wandered into the wrong restaurant.

Generally, when he moves in public it’s with a conscious effort not to be noticed: the brim of a baseball hat pulled low, the voice so soft it’s as if he’s calling the words back right after he’s uttered them. But the two impulses are easily reconcilable: The disheveled clothes in the shiny restaurant represent a generic act of rebellion, the lifelong street kid wanting to get in society’s face, even if society is now Hollywood and he’s an integral part of it. The desire to go unrecognized is the newer reflex, learned out here by any high-marquee movie actor in search of an uninterrupted meal.

Truth is, no one recognizes Mark Wahlberg much in public anyway, because the spark in him does not come from his surface; his is a surprisingly anonymous face. He is also much smaller in person than you expect, especially if the closest you’ve come to seeing him in person is on a billboard, in his underwear.

“And I had the big rubber dick in Boogie Nights,” he says between sips of sake, the words steeped in South Boston (rubber comes out “rubbah”). “So I’m constantly disappointing people when they meet me in person. It’s like, ‘What the fuck happened to you?’”

He’s drinking hot sake because his throat is sore from n=being hit with walls of water on the sound stage where he’s been spending everyday for weeks in the full-scale mock-up of a fishing boat in peril. He’s eating sushi because he’s just discovered it, and he eats it all the time now. This is the way he does everything else: tries something, gets obsessed. It’s that way with acting, and with golf, at which he’s becoming proficient - this made all the more sweet by the doubters who come up to him and his friends on the fairway at the club outside Glendale: “Who’s the member here?” “I am,” Mark gets to say, and even then, they won’t be satisfied: someone will still complain. But Mark doesn’t care.

Hell, he could probably have them thrown out f he wanted. But that’s not the way he operates anymore. He prefers his vengeance cold. He’s been trying to keep the other cheek turned for years, ever since the last few times he went home and people picked fights with hi, spitting at him at a stoplight, taunting him, because now he was too good for them. He tried to hold back. But he couldn’t. The three assault busts nearly put him back behind bars.

But he beat all three charges, and now he doesn’t even drive. Eric does. Eric drives him to sushi. Eric is the former heroin addict - turned-drug counselor with the weird little imperial beard who buffers Mark from people like us. Mark hired him after they met on the set of The Basketball Diaries, where Eric was teaching Leonardo DiCaprio how to act addicted.

Mark gives work to whomever he can, because he can: trying to help people get legit and be useful, because there was no one to do it for him in the old days and because this is what he does now. It’s not particularly exciting script for a life. We’d much rather read about people who have fallen down than about those who have gotten up and shaken themselves off.

The story of the day Mark woke up in his cell and flew into a rage because a transvestite was flirting with him while giving his cellmate a blowjob between the bars, this makes for better reading than the story about the day he went back to his old cell, long after the prison was shuttered, to research a movie, and was both unsurprised and comforted to find a Bible ion the metal slab of his bunk. About how he knew it was some kind of sign.

But the point is that he might as well help out when he can, because, God knows, they’re always asking him to anyway. Like when the phone rings in the middle of dinner. It’s an old friend with whom he was in jail a long time ago. The friend had recently done six years, as Mark tells it, after an off-duty cop caught him smoking crack in his car and he dragged the cop down the street a ways. He’s calling cause he’s on the lam again and he needs Mark’s help. So Mark excuses himself to take the call and tells the guy he has to turn himself in, and if he does, Mark will get him hooked up with Mark’s old probation officer. They talk for five minutes or so, and then Mark finishes the call, sips his sake, lights a cigarette and leans forward a little.

“He’s out on thirty years’ probation,” Mark says. “What happened this time was his girlfriend was pregnant and she was going to have the baby. He’s got a suspended license. So he starts driving to the hospital. Speeding. The cops try to pull him over. He gets out of the car and runs. He leaves his girlfriend in labor in the car. He’s getting chased by all these cops, going through houses. He went through four homes, so now he’s looking at being charged for four home invasions, too.”

Mark shakes his head in disbelief. What was he fucking thinking? The slickest liar he’d ever known, this guy- he could sell you tickets to a cockroach fight and convince you it was Holyfeld-Tyson III - but he can’t just tell the cop his girlfriend’s in labor? Reach down and start pulling the thing out? How dumb can you be to flee the scene? Unless you’re looking at thirty years.

“I told him, ‘Call your probation officer from a pay phone somewhere and say, “I want to work this out.”’ I explained to him, ‘We’ll get you a lawyer, the same lawyer who got another friend of mine off.’”

Another friend?

“The only one to graduate college. He’s a computer expert, worked for a telephone company, got fired for getting high and stuff. He violated his probation. We got him out here to work with us. Start running my web site.”

It doesn’t always work out, of course, the Mark Wahlberg save-a-stray program. Sometimes, when he brings a friend on the set, he has to explain about how he doesn’t have to steal the movie camera or the car radios. We have our own radios now. These guys you see here working on the movie, see, they’re with us.

I hear a lot of great stories during my time with Mark. They’re like his sweater with the holes in it. They’re designed to shock. But they obviously serve another purpose. Because if his first life isn’t always looking over his shoulder, if he ever loses sight of it, then all he is a former street punk trying to act like Mark Wahlberg.

But the truth is, he’s still as much the kid who was tattooed with the shamrock symbol of his street gang as he is the man who later found a tattoo artist to turn the shamrock into Sylvester the Cat. He’s still as much the kid who dropped out of ninth grade as he is the man who now speaks proudly and often of being able to pay for the education of his nine nieces and nephews.

It’s just the old two-lives adage: There’s one we’re born with and the one we live after we’ve learned the lessons of the first. It’s a truism, except that here it’s a little more complicated, because while the first life in question is best left behind, the second, out here in the lemming trappings can set their own traps. The key is in keeping them balanced. Like when the agents came courting on the Warner's’ lot after Mark had fired the old one.

“You want Bentleys? I can get you Bentleys,” George Clooney heard them say to Mark. This did not surprise George. What surprised him was how cool Mark was about it. How quickly he saw through the bullshit.

“People don’t know how smart he is,” Clooney says. “People always say [he got] this ‘street sense.’ Well he’s not this dumb thing.”

Clooney has made two movies in a row with Mark now, three Kings and The Perfect Storm, and he is producing a third, Metal God, which stars Wahlberg as the lead singer of a Judas Priest cover band who becomes Judas Priest’s lead singer. This means they will have spent a better part of two years together. Clooney takes a proprietary interest in the boy; this is clear. It’s as if Clooney sees a younger version of himself in Mark: a rake and carouser compiling a slow and steady body of work, taking none of the starfuckers seriously. Clooney is sort of Mark Wahlberg’s Boswell right now, and it’s only logical that it’s to George Clooney we turn with questions about Mark the actor.

“You watch Three Kings- he’s the lead in it,” Clooney says. “He’s the star. I remember watching him and going, ‘The little fucker. I’ll kill him.’ And he’s the lead in this one, too. So I’m just not going to act with him anymore. I’m going to say, ‘Now that you’ve taken two movies away from me, make me some money.’ I’m going to sell him down the river. My thing now is to catch Mark at the top and ride him into the ground. Ski him into oblivion.’

Clooney is wet. He’s sitting in a golf cart outside his trailer, next to Mark’s trailer, next to the sound stage with the relentless wave machine. Imagine Chinese water torture, then enlarge the drop of water by a factor of a trillion. One day, when it looked as if no one could stand to take even one more wave in the face, director Wolfgang Petersen asked for yet another take, and Wahlberg called the crew- John C. Reilly, [William Fichtner], a captivating unknown named John Hawkes - into a huddle and asked for everyone’s hands, like a team before the kickoff. This is exactly the sort of thing the old-world Clooney likes in an actor: teamwork. Doing the work when it’s demanded of you, no questions asked.

“Paul Anderson gives him Boogie Nights . . . Well, if you’re a tough thug kid, you wouldn’t want to screw around with homoerotic stuff; you’d steer away from it,” Clooney says. “Mark didn’t steer away from it at all. He just says, ‘What is it you want me to do?’”

On the lot, Mark steers an old bike with a basket and tin fenders, the kind of bike they rode on this property forty years ago. If you don’t know who he was, he’d look like a mail kid. Even if you know who h is, he looks like a mail kid.

“Sometimes I ride around the lot,” Mark says, “and I think, How the fuck did I get in here? Who let me in here, man?”

As a kid, he rode a bike. He stole it from his sister, because he had to; he had no choice, because he wanted a bike and because sometimes hand-me-downs never got to the ninth of nine kids. By the time he got the sneakers, there were holes in the canvas, and this made the kids at school laugh at him.

He painted the bike with brown house paint. It took his sister a month and a half to figure it out. The pink paint started showing through the chips.

The six boys lived in one room, the three girls in another, and their grandmother bunked in the basement. His father was a mighty man at the wheel of an 18-wheeler. Mark would sit on his lap, trying to shift and double clutch, to fathom the gears of the beats. It was his older brothers who would get to drive it home after the old man had gone out drinking.

He showed talent in sports and music. He could have gone onto catholic prep school if he’d hadn’t thrown the cinder block through the skylight of the Boys club when he was 12 so he and his buddies could swim in the pool and drink some Bud. Passing out by the pool, to be discovered and busted at dawn: possibly not his first cry-for-help act of self-destruction, but a pretty emphatic one. The club was going to pay for his education.

Last year he called the club to see if they’d let him join again. They did.

There were other avenues out of Dorchester, though: His music and his anger were going to fuel his rise. In elementary school talent shows, he’d break-dance and spin his little-kid white-rap verse, because even then he thought he had something to say. That’s why when his brother Donnie started fronting a band called New Kids on the Block. Mark could have gone that way, too, but he didn’t like the singing lessons and the choreographed dancing; he was committed to harder stuff. So he’d open for New kids, and at the black high schools they’d go crazy for the break-dancing white kid.

The other reason he didn’t stay with New Kids was that he didn’t want to commit to something that would take him off the streets, where is where [art of him belonged, in the gangs: “We weren’t doing drive-by shootings, but we were robbing people and fucking people up.”

The logic behind the behavior that led him to twist and skew, inevitably, toward jail, toward wrong, wasn’t complicated from where he stood: The kid across the street had bikes and clothes and money for an education, and he never would. Mark didn’t see what he was doing as a question of morality. He saw it as an imperative. “I had a good idea of what right and wrong were supposed to be,” he says. “But in my world, I didn’t think it necessarily applied.”

When they finally did lock him up, it was for something he hadn’t done. Well, he done it, but not when he was himself; he’d smoked angel dust, for the first and last time, and it made him someone he’d never been. They’d found the joints in a friend’s freezer. They were the weirdest joints he’d ever tasted. To this day, Mark is certain that if he’d just been drunk on wine coolers or vodka or schnapps, it would have been different.

“First off, if I robbed somebody, which I ‘d done before, I wouldn’t have hit somebody in the head,” he says. “I’d have done it the right way. I wouldn’t have come back and started pulling people out of their cars as they were driving by. I’d have fucking took off, man. I’d gone home, drunk my beers on the porch.”

The plan that night was to go out and rob the pharmacy and steal the scratch-off tickets and take the register. [...] The pharmacy was about to close, and the security guard was outside with a stick with a hook on it to pull down the iron grate. When he put the stick down, Mark grabbed it. "I hit the security guard from behind, ran into the store. [...] There was a girl working the register that we knew, so we ran behind the counter and took all the scratch tickets, took money out of the register. Then we went down another street. We'd been drinking all night. So we're standing in front of the liquor store, and this guy comes out with two cases of beer. So I go to do the same thing. I go to hit the guy across the arm. The stick hit him in the shoulder, came up, the hook hit him in the eye and the temple. He lost the eye. I didn't know it then."

He was swinging from his heels, and as the stick hit the man, Mark fell on the sidewalk. His friend, who was kicking the victim, starting kicking Mark, who gathered up some of the beer, ran down a side street, popped a beer and came back to the scene. The next thing, they tell him, he was attacking someone in a car, screaming, when detectives who'd been called to the scene, happened by.

So he started to fight the detectives. When they had him in cuffs at the station, he kicked at another cop and broke the man's nose. They charged him with that, too. He was 16 at the time. He was 17 when he was sentenced, as an adult, and spent three months in jail, followed by years of probation.

Jail time worked the way it’s supposed to. It wasn’t just the squalor, the way he’d settled down with the bottom feeders in the world of the warped. It was the way the reality of the thing hit him on the day the television on his tier featured a concert by New Kids on the Block.

Mark told everyone it was his brother. No one believed him. He bet them ti was. In the end he collected, in cigarettes and twinkies. What he didn’t tell them was that he could have been in the band instead of behind the bars.

“I didn’t want to have to hear, ‘You stoopid motherfucker,’” he says now, and it was about then that he more or less vowed to never have to hear it again.

In Los Angeles, his brother Donnie helped him out in a couple of ways. He had a buddy keep an eye on him - a guy whose mother had visited with Mark and prayed with him in the Plymouth County House of Corrections - and he hooked him up with a recording contract. Within two years of his release from Plymouth, the debut album by his band, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, went platinum. If the signature single, “Good Vibrations,” wasn’t as hard-core as some of the other songs Mark wanted the label to promote, there were certain perks to the turnaround in his fortune.

Like the day Calvin Klein sent his jet to Boston to ferry Mark and his friends to the Hamptons, to ask him to pose in his underwear. They drank Champagne on the flight to Long Island. But they couldn’t convince the pilot to take them to Jamaica on the way back. Eventually, Mark landed back on the street in Dorchester. In limbo. Going nowhere: The underwear campaign didn’t promote the records, as he thought it would.

“I could have easily started to get sucked up into the person that the record company wanted me to be and be consumed with success and figure out later how I actually do my thing, because I had a lot to say and I wanted to say it,” he tells me in the sushi place, which by now is humming with Hollywood humanity, half of whom want us to put out our cigarette. We’re in the smoking section.

“But after not getting to release records I wanted to do, and doing the underwear thing, all of a sudden I was thinking, ‘Where am I?”

So he read for Penny Marshall and Danny DeVito for Renaissance man and got the part. He started getting roles in Independent productions and making his own short movies, starring his friends. Black comedies. Very black. As in murder, suicide and marital aids. Designed to shock a little. But even at their weirdest, sickest ad most wacked-out, Mark’s short movies all have this in common: The macho guy gets his comeuppance. The films The films all have fun with the male stereotype that got Mark into trouble in the first place, although sometimes the morality-tales part of them tends to get lost in the action.

Gotta Get Off is about a guy who takes a love drug and calls some girls but ends up being raped by a pimp. DamnVan Damme, about trying to kill Jean-Claude Van Damme, is nearly finished. Mark cast his brother, a contractor, in an Irish mob story, Quiet Man, but his brother balked at the scene in which the character asks the girl to put on a strap-on dildo. “He says, ‘There’s no fucking way I’m saying that. Why can’t I bang her in the Jacuzzi?’” Mark recalls. “”I say, ‘There’s no banging going on in this movie. It’s not that kind of movie. We’ve seen that too many times. You have to do something to fuck it up.’ That’s what all my movies are about. It’s more interesting that way. You’ve seen the other shit. But how many times have you seen a happy ending be a guy raped by a pimp?”

“What’s so happy about that” I say.

“He got what he wanted,” Mark says. “At the end of the movie, after he gets raped, the two girls show up. It’s a happy ending for him.”

Mark hasn’t made a wacked-out movie in a while. Besides, there’s another movie he says he wants to make now: the life story of his former probation officer, who runs a program to help wayward kids.

But he does confess he has an idea for another short movie. He has already cast a friend as the lead. It’s about an undertaker for the Mob who has sex with corpses.

“There’s this duality to him,” Diane Lane says one day in a van parked up the street from the Gloucester docks, where the boat is being readied for the scenes at sea. Lane plays Mark’s girlfriend in the movie. She’s smoking cigarettes and laughing a lot just thinking about the first day they got together on the set, when they had to make out, and how she was glad to see how nervous he was.

“There was a part of him that was vulnerable, that I wasn’t sure was going to be there,” she says. “I was relieved that there was this human side.”

Lane has acted with Laurence Olivier and Burt Lancaster, so she has given more than a little thought to the chemistry that produces leading men out of some actors and two-dimensional fools out of others. For her it all comes down to how an actor interacts with the actress, in whom the man’s character is reflected; the woman can’t endow the man with leading man appeal if he doesn’t show some character and some self-awareness.

“There’s a lack of defensiveness in him,” she says. “He couldn’t have done what he did in Boogie Nights without a perspective on himself. He couldn’t have done that without self-parody, a willingness to go beyond the bounds of coolness.

“He’s very tender. And very available emotionally, which is very rare and very welcome in men certainly in this business, if you have any machismo going on with your image.

“And then,” she says, “there’s the rap character, which bursts out of nowhere, when he’s talking to some of his guys: ‘You’re a motherfuckin’ this and motherfuckin’ that.’ And I’m saying, ‘OK, OK, OK. Where’s the other Mark? Bring the other Mark back, please.’

“I haven’t reconciled the two yet,” she says.

The thought seems to hang there; it slightly troubles her. It’s an hour later when she comes over to me with a look on her face that says she’s arrived at a conclusion, which she has, but it’s not the conclusion I’d expected.

“Did I tell you I could eat him with a spoon?” she says. I tell her she hadn’t. “Yes, and afterwards we may have children,” she says, and turns and walks away.

If we order more sake, it’ll get in the way of tomorrow’s shooting schedule, which calls for Mark to be hit with another hundred or so walls of water. Now, tonight, at the end of dinner, the spark in him is out. Part of the deal here was that even though he doesn’t like to give interviews, he thought this might be the one that convinces people there’s more complicated side to the man formerly known as Marky Mark.

But what’s happened instead is, he still hasn’t said what he wants to say, not in a way to make himself heard The whole thing has been sort of another performance that’s been coaxed out of the little break-dancing white-rapper kid- the way the underwear people used him and the record company used him. He’s been a willing accomplice, of course, but here we are at the end, and what he feels, instead of energized, is very much alone.

“I haven’t been in a situation where I can really talk to somebody who’s willing to try and look at it from my side,” he says. “A lot of journalists find some angle in my past, but it’s never ‘This kid has actually overcome something.’ So I find myself giving up, until I can do it on my own. If I get all the money in the world, then I can go out there and do it, and help kids like me.”

The voice is raspy by now, and he’s barely audible.

“I never thought I could change the world” is just about the last thing he says. “But if I’m in a position to do something, and I don’t, then, you know, I deserve to go to hell, you know what I mean?”

This is not the first time he’s mentioned the afterlife. He’d already told me about the earthquake last year, the one that jolted his eleventh-floor apartment on Wilshire Boulevard and shot him from one end of his couch to the other. That night his fear of an apocalyptic end, he told me, gave way to relief at a sudden realization: He had no urge to drop to his knees and make final desperate peace with his maker. On the other hand, he knew then and knows now, salvation is by no means assured.

“You believe in hell, don’t you” I say.

“Supposed to be a lot of chicks down there,” he says, and he smiles, and I know that he’s really of two minds about it. He’s the kid who used to believe in the fires of hell until he grew up and left that Grimm tale behind, but he’s also the young man who needs the fact of hell to be true. Because if the hell that got him here hadn’t been real, then the deliverance of Mark Wahlberg has been for nothing but an illusion and all we’re left with is some whacked out movie about an earnest-as-hell street punk who moves west and hires all his friends to teach Hollywood how to do it right, until the plot twists on him and he ends up acting in a Forth of July movie starring a lot of Special effects and a really big wave, which swallows him whole and drags him to the bottom of a very black sea.

Back to Internet Graffiti