Mark Wahlberg: 'I've been hustling my entire life' Mark Wahlberg lolls at the table in the hotel conference room, his muscled forearms folded across his chest, every inch the successful young buck at play. Seated beside him is a middle-aged man with cerebral palsy and a crooked grin. "This is Howard," says Wahlberg by way of introduction. He's like my spiritual guru. Right from the start it is clear that the interview will not run along conventional lines. Broken City Production year: 2013 Directors: Allen Hughes Cast: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mark Wahlberg, Russell Crowe On balance, and with the benefit of hindsight, I'd take an audience with Mark Wahlberg over most other Hollywood A-listers: the ones who are smooth like snake-charmers and the ones who are closed like clams. In person, by contrast, the star of Boogie Nights and The Departed is brash, bawdy and perilously incorrect - a Boston lout made good yet not entirely transformed. He comes trailing baggage, he comes trailing sidekicks. He says he comes burdened by guilt from the crimes in his past, although he wears it so lightly it may as well be his T-shirt. "I've always wanted to do right in life," he says at one point. But the wanting and the doing aren't quite the same thing. Wahlberg is in town to promote his role in Broken City, a big, corny crime thriller, full of flashing police lights, blazing revelations and swooping helicopter shots over the streets of Manhattan. He plays Billy Taggart, a private detective in over his head, uncovering political corruption that goes right to the top. The actor says that he was drawn to the character because he is a flawed blue-collar type, desperately toiling to do the right thing. These, it seems, are the men he responds to. Oh, absolutely. I can't relate to the good-looking guy who's got no problems and has the girlfriend he's just slightly better looking than. He shrugs. I'm not the matinee idol type. Mark Wahlberg as Billy Taggert in Broken City. Photograph: Barry Wetcher SMPSP He was born into a boisterous Catholic household in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest of nine children, the son of a teamster. The adolescent Wahlberg was, from the sounds of it, a nasty piece of work: dealing drugs and throwing punches and bouncing in and out of trouble with the local police. At the age of 16 he was convicted of assaulting a Vietnamese shopkeeper while loaded on angel dust and went on to serve a 45-day stretch at the Deer Island house of correction. This, he says, was his wake-up call. He turned like Paul on the road to Damascus. Was it acting or the church that dragged his life around? "Well, both," he says. Jail made me go to church and church eventually brought me to acting. So it was both of those things, and it was time as well, the passing of time. On leaving Deer Island, he made a conscious decision to distance himself from his former partners in crime. The trouble was that I still lived in the neighbourhood. I couldn't just move to a better neighbourhood. And when you're there and you're not one of them, you're basically against them. So that was a problem. Lot of arguments; a few fights too. Is he still in touch with anyone from the old neighbourhood? Oh sure. He turns towards Howard. Remember that guy I was yelling at on the phone yesterday? Well, he's in jail again. What happened was that this guy went on the run, he was basically in default of court, and he wanted to hide out with me in California. I said: 'Dude, absolutely not, I'm not aiding and abetting a fugitive. Turn yourself in. But he didn't listen, he didn't listen. He wanted me to pay for his lawyer because I paid for his lawyer before. Another shrug. So anyway, he gets grabbed and now he's inside and his wife is saying that we've got an arrangement where I have to pay her a certain amount of money each month. He finally called me last night. I was in the fucking green-room of the Graham Norton show and I start fucking swearing down the phone at him and it sends me into a tailspin. The producer woman was like, 'Oh wow, shall I wait outside?' Wahlberg shakes his head at the sheer dumb injustice of it all. The thing is, I was in jail with this guy when I was 17 years old. I was coming in and he was pretty much leaving and he gave me his TV, this old black-and-white TV which had a cone with these wires on it for a speaker. So now it's like I owe him for life. In his late teens, at liberty again, Wahlberg enjoyed a brief spell of musical stardom as the bad-boy front-man of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. From there he went on to land a lucrative modelling contract, parading himself in Calvin Klein underwear alongside an unclad Kate Moss. It was Hollywood, however, that threw him a lifeline. He made his screen debut (still credited as Marky Mark) in the 1993 film The Substitute and has been working pretty much ever since. At the age of 41, he still looks the part of the puppyish street punk, rude and unschooled, still growing into his talent. And yet for all his Jack-the-lad swagger, he can be a wonderfully subtle and unflashy performer. Wahlberg was oddly poignant in his breakthrough role as Dirk Diggler, the dishwasher turned porn star in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights. He was purely mesmerising as imperilled Sergeant Barlow, making a fraught call home in the Gulf war thriller Three Kings and provided the foursquare soul and centre of The Fighter, quietly anchoring the Oscar-winning pyrotechnics of co-stars Christian Bale and Melissa Leo. Along the way he has even showed his skill at comedy - rearing up as a hilarious emblem of alpha-male virility in (the otherwise idiotic) Date Night and slumped on the couch with a profane talking teddy-bear in Seth MacFarlane's Ted. The science of acting seems to leave him cold. "Ooh," he says, affecting the voice of a prissy, self-obsessed thespian. Ooh, let me think about my dead cat. Let me think about the colour blue. Let me go into that little place in my room where I used to hide when I was seven. He pulls a face. It might work for some people but that's not for me, dude, I have a different set of tools. All the real-life experience I have is an advantage. It's not just method and technique. These days he has four children with his wife, the model Rhea Durham, and the family reportedly live a quiet, church-going lifestyle at their base in Los Angeles. Away from the cameras, his portfolio is booming. Wahlberg co-owns a restaurant (Wahlburgers) in his native Boston, runs a charity (the Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation) and has served as executive producer on the likes of Boardwalk Empire and Entourage (an HBO show loosely based on his own youthful misadventures in Hollywood). The business ventures are good, he says, because he can run them from home. I'll get up early, work out before the kids wake up, have a nice breakfast, take the kids to school, hit the church and then I'm back home by nine. The rest of the day I'm taking care of business. Wahlberg with Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext Collection He brandishes his phone. I mean, this isn't my phone, it's Howard's phone. But this is like my office. And when I'm home and we have a meeting, everyone comes to the house. The only thing I don't like about acting is that it takes so much time away from my family. Otherwise I don't have any complaints. Presumably Wahlberg's children only know their father as a polished, successful movie star and entrepreneur. He confesses that he has yet to tell them about the bad old days. At the right time. They're still kind of too young. There's a lot of explaining to do and I'm just trying to find the right time and the right place. He suspects that they may already have inklings. I mean, they know where I come from. They know where my mum lives. They've seen where my cousins live. They've just been in Boston, they went to the restaurant, and that was a good test for me, you know? Their name is up there above the front door, but they didn't walk in and start barking orders. They were, like, bussing tables and waiting on people. That was a good thing to see. It shows they want to work. Until this point Howard has been a largely silent presence at the conference room table. He chips in occasionally to clarify a point, laugh at a joke, or concur with a statement, yet otherwise seems perfectly content to remain in the background. All the same, I'm intrigued by their relationship. Who is Howard, exactly? Is he Wahlberg's spiritual guru, his business partner, or what? No, no, Wahlberg says, the pair are just friends. They first hooked up in London 20 years ago. I was performing and he was backstage. He called me a wanker and a cunt and we've been buddies ever since. Howard laughs and raises a hand in protest. Don't put that in! He goes on to explain that the actor is actually one of the most generous people he knows. When I first met Mark I thought, 'Bloody hell, Hollywood actor' and I told all my mates. But now, 20 years later, he's just Mark, my buddy, who happens to have a really good job. Wahlberg with Christian Bale in The Fighter. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures Wahlberg says that he hangs out with Howard whenever he's in London. It's funny, my wife had never met him until the other day. She'd say: 'Who is this Howard guy?' and I'd say: 'He's my friend. He comes and stays in the hotel with me. She says: 'He stays in the room?' and I'm like: 'Yeah, yeah. Sometimes he sleeps on the couch and sometimes in the bed with me. He's my buddy. Ain't nothing going on.' Wahlberg flashes an evil grin. And then we wake up in the morning and he says: 'My asshole hurts! What did you do to me?' "Don't put that in!" yells Howard. Howard Thorpe, it transpires, is actually the founder of ABLE2UK, a disability awareness website. Last year he staged a benefit concert. He now plans to stage another, ideally featuring a reunion of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, although the main attraction has yet to confirm. "Of course he pockets all the cash," Wahlberg jokes. He says it's going to good causes. It's not. He pulls up to the venue in a fucking BMW, all rigged up with a special seat. "Again!" yells Howard. By now the conversation is running out of control. Next, I say, he'll be claiming that Howard doesn't really have cerebral palsy. "Yeah, that's right," Wahlberg guffaws. He learnt it all from watching a fucking documentary on Stephen Hawking. "Shush," says Howard, raising a conspiratorial finger to his lips. Don't tell. Acting, admits Wahlberg, has been the making of him. It took him from the streets of Boston to Beverly Hills. It's made him rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams and helped paper over the sins of his past. The more he thinks about it, though, the more he suspects the two worlds are not really so different. It's all about hustling, whether it's in Boston or the film industry. I've been hustling my entire life - acting my way into trouble and acting my way back out again. I'm just fortunate to have had the opportunity to apply it in a different direction. At one stage, mid-sentence, he leans back so far that he nearly overbalances. For one agonising moment his face is stricken and his arms are pin-wheeling - and then the chair magically rights itself and pitches him back towards the table. He was almost gone; he almost crashed out. "Yeah, well," says Wahlberg. It's happened before. Broken City is out on 1 March