My Case Against Mark Wahlberg
I’ve made no attempt to hide my disgust for Mark Wahlberg movies on this site and I will continue to fight the good fight in order to educate the masses on the black hole of talent known as Marky Mark. You may not agree with me now but I hope that by the end of this article you will be in the streets protesting the very idea of another Wahlberg-led sequel to Transformers or whatever other piece of trash he is currently making. Won’t you join me on this journey?
You can try to argue with me here but in my eyes Daniel Day-Lewis is the greatest actor alive today. That dude pretends better than any other guy I’ve ever seen. I can vividly remember seeing The Last of the Mohicans (my second favorite movie of all time!) in theaters and while I didn’t recognize how awesome he was in it at the time, every time I re-watch that scene at the waterfall I find it difficult to fight back the goose bumps given to me by that speech to his young lady love. However you remember your first experience watching a Daniel Day-Lewis film I’d like to re-visit a few reasons why DDL is in fact one of the greatest and most hardcore actors alive today. But how does the veteran actors’ method style acting stack up to the underwear model/rapper turned actor from Boston? Well, I guess you can make that decision on your own.
After a series of shows and films Daniel Day-Lewis’s first role to blow the pants off of critics was in the 1989 film My Left Foot about a man with cerebral palsy who learns to paint with his left foot. Some of you hardcore action fans probably aren’t going to be buying this film on Blu-Ray anytime soon but check out some of the crazy shit that DDL went through in order to bring his character Christy Brown to life. In order to truly get into the character, Lewis spent the duration of the shoot in a wheelchair; having to be pushed around on set and fed by spoon by members of the production crew. Lewis was so into the role that he broke two of his ribs from the constant slouching over.
Lewis probably sat there for a month to prepare for that scene.
From Mark Wahlberg’s first big role in Boogie Nights in 1997 to his rock star portrayal in the film Rock Star, Marky Mark displayed the kind of mind-bending talent that he has become known for since then; the type of transformative abilities that a third party might consider almost magical in nature. You see, for the six movies that Wahlberg filmed between the two aforementioned films Mark didn’t even change his hairstyle. As far as I’m concerned Wahlberg has played the same role in 95% of his films to date: a Massachusetts-born man named Mark Wahlberg.
I’ll give you $20 if you can guess which movie this is from.
For Lewis’s role in The Last of the Mohicans he went full-on frontiersman and refused to eat anything that he didn’t kill himself. Lewis spent several months prior to filming living off of the land in the Alabama wilderness, fishing, hunting, building a canoe, and being a total Survivorman-styled badass in order to get into the character of Hawkeye.
Despite actually being an actual recording artist Marky Mark from Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch doesn’t even do his own singing in the 2001 film Rock Star. I mean, why would he? He did wear a terrible wig which makes him look like even more of a douche than I would have thought possible. Mark’s method acting was pretty intense compared to his earlier movies. Instead of just skimming through the script he researched the role by “hanging out with real rock stars” before filming started. Sheer intensity….
Daniel Day-Lewis is an actor that just won’t quit. He legit went to solitary confinement for his role in the film In the Name of the Father and spent three nights awake before filming an interrogation scene where he asked the other actors to basically torture him for real but I love some of the stuff he went through for the 1996 period piece The Crucible. You may have seen this adaptation when you were in junior high but you probably didn’t know that Lewis didn’t shower for the duration of filming and helped build the set with the crew before living in one of the 17th century houses on set.
The look on her face tells me that Lewis smells like cooked cabbage.
Mark Wahlberg has appeared in over 35 films to date and in no less than 12 of them his role was either a military man or some version of a police officer or an undercover police officer. Talk about range.
The classic Wahlberg “holding in a fart while in a movie theater” look.
For his role as Bill “The Butcher” Cutting in the 2002 film Gangs of New York DDL spent the length of filming in character; learning to be a real butcher, sharpening his knives off screen, and refusing to wear any modern-day clothing despite the cold. That final decision would cause him to be diagnosed with pneumonia but even after that he refused to use any modern medicine.
Did people get pneumonia back in the 1860’s? Ok, I’ll have some of that then.
Despite dropping out of high school in the 9th grade Mark Wahlberg took on the role of a scientist in 2001’s Planet of the Apes and played a science teacher in the 2008 film The Happening. I can honestly say that The Happening is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. I would rather be water boarded than to have to watch that film on a loop. In neither film does Mark do any science-y stuff but you can be damn sure that he thought about which face he’d make if he had to read words like “diffraction” or “quantum mechanics”.
“Hey guys, look at all my science!”
By now you’ve probably noticed a recurring theme; Daniel Day-Lewis is a method-acting maniac who prepares for roles like the serial killer from HBO’s True Detective and I hate Mark Wahlberg. Lewis has only made five films since 1997 so he has had plenty of time to get real weird with some of his roles while Wahlberg has made five films since January of 2015. If Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine wine, aged to perfection over the years then Mark Wahlberg is a warm can of Natural Ice sitting in the trunk of your car for six months, but if there is ever a need for a police officer with a crew cut from Boston in your script then Mark Wahlberg just might be your guy.
Wahlberg, the 40-year-old actor, successful producer, onetime rapper, loquacious friend to animals and former Calvin Klein model, has not one but two Oscar nominations to his credit. One is for Best Supporting Actor for “The Departed” in 2007, and one came in 2011 for his role as a producer of the Best Picture-nominated “The Fighter,” in which he also starred.
What’s really surprising, though, once you take a moment to sift through Wahlberg’s extraordinarily unlikely career, is not that he has two Oscar nominations but that he doesn’t have a whole lot more.
For example: I took to Twitter to see if anyone could guess what exactly his Oscar nominations were for, and several of the subsequent guesses — an acting nod for “Boogie Nights,” perhaps? Or for “Three Kings”? Or “The Fighter”? — were incorrect yet totally plausible.
Then a pair of astute film critics, Dana Stevens of Slate and Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe, weighed in and suggested Wahlberg’s best work may have been in David O. Russell’s “I Heart Huckabees,” a movie that’s now perhaps best remembered for an incident on set. And the DealBook reporter Peter Lattman, among others, cast an additional vote for Wahlberg’s overlooked work in the 2000 film “The Yards.”
This means that, by my count, Mark Wahlberg could legitimately have received up to six Oscar nominations for acting, to go along with that one he did get for producing, for a grand total of seven actual and theoretical nominations. It also means that in the years since “Boogie Nights” in 1997, Wahlberg has assembled a résumé — putting aside such misfires as “Shooter,” “The Truth About Charlie,” “Planet of the Apes” etc. — that could rival that of any Hollywood actor of a similar age (i.e. under 50).
To put this in perspective, Matt Damon, who is 41, and who I think would come more easily to mind when invoking words like “best” “actor” and “generation,” has three actual Oscar nominations (Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay for “Good Will Hunting,” 1997; Best Supporting Actor for “Invictus,” 2009) and one actual Oscar win (screenplay for “Good Will Hunting”) to his credit. (Oddly, Damon and Wahlberg’s breakout roles came in the same year, 1997.) But how many Oscar nominations could/should Damon plausibly have? Foregoing his very good, very small, prefame role in the 1995 film “Courage Under Fire,” here are the contenders: “The Talented Mister Ripley,” “The Departed” and . . . um, “The Informant”? “Syriana”? “The Good Shepherd”? “True Grit?” Which is to say, Matt Damon is a hugely entertaining actor to watch, but you’d be hard-pressed to find three more roles of his that you could legitimately argue should have been Oscar-nominated, but were not.
Mark Wahlberg, on the other hand, could have six.
It must have been really difficult for Mark Wahlberg, during his two Oscar-nominated films, to find the “voices” for the two characters which he was assuming the role of. Was it the boxer from Massachusetts or the police officer from Massachusetts?