Donnie Wahlberg looks like he'd rather be anywhere than where he is, which is in a Boston hotel room, doing an interview. "I haven't done this in a long time," he says, turning on the lights and closing the blinds. He settles his 5' 11" frame into the farthest corner of the couch, and adds wearily, "It's hard when you've been burned."
Harder yet to be forgotten. Wahlberg, who turns 30 in August, is a long way from his teen-idol days as the so-called "bad boy" of the squeaky-clean pop group New Kids On The Block, which in 1990 alone grossed more than $800 million. When the bubble-gum bubble burst, he turned to acting. After small roles in nine films, he has a starring role in the soon to be released SOUTHIE. Locally produced written and directed, the film is set in the most depressed pocket of South Boston and tells the story of a young man's struggle to remain sober and take care of his family. It's Boston premiere is scheduled for May 28.
This time out, though, it's not about being famous or rich he insists. "it's about work, about challenging myself." Wahlberg's grunge-casual demeanor belies his seriousness. Wearing a tight T-shirt under an oversized blue workshirt, baggy gym pants, and sporting the barely there beard popularized on street corners and billboards, he appears are deceiving. He's willing to take risks, he says, but only when he considers it's worth it. "I've learned to walk away very carefully into the eye of the storm," he explains, referring to the unforgiving maelstrom of celebrity.
"It's not about being a star," says Wahlberg, who's clearly been there, done that. "It's about finding something that makes me hunger. I used to hunger for music and performing and adulation and love and success. And yeah, the chance to say "fuck you" to the critics. That used to fuel me."
And the reason the critics needed a good "fuck you" says Wahlberg, is that when many of them bashed the New Kids it felt more personal than professional. And the harshest bashing was here in his hometown of Boston.
"One of the most hurtful things about the New Kids experience," he says between bites of a Balance Bar and sips of water, "is that I dreamed of being like Rocky, of walking down the street and some guy in a sub shop yelling, "Hey, Donnie, alright," and just being loved where I came from."
But Boston seemed, well, embarrassed by the Kids. When the group walked onto the stage at the 1990 Boston Music Awards to accept their award, they were booed by some in the audience. And the critics were never kind ("They sucked" says Charles Laquidara, rock jock at WZLX-FM "[Wahlberg] should have expected to be goofed on for that phoney-baloney act.")
granted the songs were forgettable, but the marketing was inspired. Wahlberg was savvy enough to go the Jackson 5 one better: He and Maurice Starr, who became their producer, pulled together five young white guys-all cute yet each one a different personality. Above all, they were nice. Safe. As much as the girls liked them, the parents liked them more and happily paid for all the stuff: NKOTB sheets, playing cards, marbles, T-shirts, dolls, key rings, etc. Wahlberg and Starr recognized early on that the big money was in merchandising.
But like the Spice Girls, respect eluded the group. Though Wahlberg allows that there were aspects of the New Kids act that were silly and foolish, he remains unrepentant. "I'm not ashamed of anything. I have nothing to apologize for." But back to the movie career.
"I'm not on some 'reinventing myself' trip," says Wahlberg, bridling at the suggestion. "It strikes me as crazy that I'm like a politician with an agenda to market myself. That's not me. It isn't what I do. I aspire to grow and be a better person and be in touch with my spirituality. If that doesn't make for good copy, I don't care. That's who I am."
Who Wahlberg is, if you don't already know, is one of nine children, ("Marky Mark," of BOOGIE NIGHTS fame is the youngest). He grew up in the hard-scrabble Ashmont section of Dorchester. His father, he recalls "drank more than he ate," left the family when Donnie was 13, leaving him to care for the rest of the family. He was the only one willing-and able-to take the job. He avoided "certain pitfalls"- drugs, alcohol, jail.
"In school I'd get 25 cents in the morning for snacks and, from October 1st to Christmas, I would save every penny in a jar to buy presents. Later, when the group made it I tried to bring everyone along for the ride. I wanted to pick up all my friends and family and this city and just carry it on my back. I was exhausted. As big as the New Kids got, this caretaker thing got bigger."
But it also got him the part of Danny Quinn, a tough, emotional role he seems to have been born to play. Quinn, the lead character in SOUTHIE, is a reformed street thug who returns to the old neighborhood and struggles to resist being pulled back into the Irish Mafia. The film was shot in Boston in early 1997 and although it has been featured in several independent film festivals and won the prestigious America Independent Filmmaker Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, only now is it hitting the big screen.
The two-year delay is the price, says its director and costar John Shea, of being an independent film. "It drove me nuts" says Shea, "to see the GOOD WILL HUNTING and MONUMENTAL AVE. Directors come to our wrap party in Boston, hire our crew, use our locations, and then get their stuff out there so much faster because they had the big production houses behind them."
When SOUTHIE finally hits the theaters, Shea hopes it will make Wahlberg a movie star. Maybe it will. Not only did the role call for a street-wise kid from a tough Boston neighborhood, it also demanded an actor who "could throw a punch and kiss a girl with equal conviction, someone who has street credibility and vulnerability at the same time," says Shea, "and after looking at leading actors from around the world, Donnie had a toughness and a genuineness and an unflinching confidence in his eye that made me believe he could do it."
"It was the caretaker thing," allows Wahlberg even of the memory. "That was my role in my family. And while a lot of these actors said 'Yeah, I can be tough and do the street thug thing, they didn't understand the huge burden Danny carried, the weight of making sure your family is safe and happy and comfortable. I knew the burden, and I knew there wasn't another actor out there that could bring it to the film the way that I could."
Wahlberg isn't new to Hollywood. Having appeared in a string of films and television movies, his last notable effort was in the major hit RANSOM, directed by Ron Howard, starring Mel Gibson and Gary Sinise. "I busted my ass to get that part," says Wahlberg, "I had five auditions, and when I got [the role] I jumped up and down. Then I stopped and said 'shit, now what do I do?"
What he did was submerge himself in the process of becoming the character. While he doesn't take formal acting classes, he nonetheless studies method acting four hours a day. Director Ron Howard considers Wahlberg "a natural," according to Shea. "I probably did go into this thinking that it would be a little bit easier, and it, could be easy if I wanted it to be. I could just show up nine of out 10 times and that would be good enough. But I've discovered that I don't want to do that. I came to a point where I looked in the mirror and said 'O.K., it's up to you. You can dig in and try to be the best you can be or you can do enough just to get by."
"Donnie is an incredible talent in everything he does," says John Dukakis, who, with the late Bob Woolf, managed the New Kid's money, and is currently managing the musical end of Will Smith's career. "Donnie was the John Lennon of that operation. He has great vision."
"Everything he's done, he's been right," says Bill Costa, KISS 108's news and entertainment director. "He was the originator of New Kids and that [was a success]. The he produced Marky Mark-and that was a smash hit. Now he's really working Hollywood. He's all work. And he was all work in the early days."
"When the New Kids ended in 1994, I though I was the best prepared for it to end, but I wasn't," says Wahlberg, running his fingers through his short blond hair before putting them back into his lap, fisted. "It surprised me that I was afraid, that after 10 years there was no more 'fame' to protect me from everything. I have a big personality, and a big spirit, but the fame is just huge."
Wahlberg spent years struggling with that fame, and then with the void it left behind when it evaporated. The battle has brought him back to regular Sunday services after years of alienation from the Catholic Church.
And sometime within the next year plans to marry, at long last, the mother of his six year old son. "I made it through but the challenge, the high, the rush is different this time," he says relaxing now. He leans forward to make his point. "It's all in slow motion, it's under control. It's not all chaos. I can get on a plane after shooting a movie and fly home and be a normal person again. I'm a nobody in LA and I love it. I didn't know how much I would. It's tough being a nobody but only until you realize what you really want. And I don't want fame for fame's sake. I've been there."
What he wants now is to find more and better roles, like the part in the upcoming SIXTH SENSE, a drama starring Bruce Willis as a child psychologist and Wahlberg the patient he failed. Wahlberg calls it the "the greatest challenge of my life and the most satisfying thing I've ever done, work wise."
Although his appearance on screen lasts only two minutes, Wahlberg threw body and soul into the performance. He lost 40 pounds of muscle in five weeks by starving himself. Then he slept under the bushes in a public park to experience the terror and isolation of his character: a 19 year old heroin addict about to commit suicide.
"I could have just shown up, and done it. But it was time for me to realize if I really was an actor or not. Nothing can replace that feeling of walking off that set having bared my soul, which no one expected me to do."
But he did it. He felt so close to the character, he experienced real physical pain. "I suffered and suffered, but as I did, a parallel strength was growing inside. What a journey, whoa!" he says giving a yell, arms high-fiving the air, laughing.
In that moment, Wahlberg the actor, if not the movie star, was born.