Money talks for Marky Mark

Mark Wahlberg has come a long way since he erupted onto the international music scene fronting Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch, which had a hit with Good Vibrations in 1991.

More than 20 years later, he is a bona fide Hollywood star, and a film and TV producer to boot, invariably cringing when reminded of his poptastic heyday.

While promoting his latest film - the action buddy movie 2 Guns, which opens in Singapore tomorrow - he ponders what it would take for him to assume the Marky Mark persona again.

"It'd take a lot of money," he says with a laugh.

"Seriously, a lot of money. I said somewhere jokingly that I was going to come back and people took me seriously. Then I got all these phone calls and I thought, 'You know what, if there was the right cause and the right atmosphere, maybe I would perform again.'

"I'd like it with no cameras and none of these iPhones, none of that stuff around, but for a special cause or something, I would consider it."

Wahlberg, 41, is a charitable guy - he established the Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation in 2001, for example - and a family man with a wife, former model Rhea Durham, and four children.

He was not always this wholesome. He had largely cleaned up his act by the time he found fame with the Funky Bunch, but even then he lived a fast lifestyle.

"There is not much I miss about those days," he concedes. "Those days were crazy and wild, but I am glad when I got into movies and had to be more disciplined.

"I do have discipline in my life. I am embracing maturing and getting older and I am in a good space right now. My wife calls me an old man because I go to bed at 8.30, 9pm.

"But I am up at 4.30am, when no one else is up and that is a nice feeling.

He adds: "Hard work pays off, man."

In professional terms, he has never been busier.

This year he has already appeared on screen opposite Russell Crowe in Broken City, which he also produced, and featured in another two-hander, Pain & Gain, with Dwayne Johnson.

Even as his latest film, 2 Guns, rolls out, he is already at work on the next Transformers movie, having replaced Shia LaBeouf as the franchise's primary human.

"Things are going pretty well," he says of his career. "And I think 2 Guns is so cool that people are going to love it. It's just a great balance of action and humour and suspense, and very well-rounded characters.

"You get a guy like Denzel playing a part like this and it's going to be very interesting, with complex characters."

The film, which stars him and Denzel Washington as two law enforcement agents on the run from a drug cartel, has taken close to US$85 million (S$107 million) during its release this month in the United States, and Wahlberg will almost certainly be sure of big box-office figures when Transformers: Age Of Extinction opens next year.

His commercial success, however, has been tempered by the tragedy that struck his hometown of Boston in April this year, when two bombs caused mayhem at the annual marathon.

He says: "Obviously, it was a horrible, horrible tragedy, but we have to try to regroup and rebuild and move forward, though it will never be the same.

"I have walked up and down that street thousands and thousands of times. I went to school right around the corner at the end of the marathon.

"That woman who lost her son and whose daughter lost her leg, she grew up six streets from where I lived. One of the girls on a show that we recently shot a pilot for, her two brothers, they're 31 and 33, both lost their right legs.

"So it's as close to home as it can get and we are just hoping that people will come together and heal."

It is the same place where he grew up, on the tough south side of Boston, Massachusetts.

At 16, he robbed a pharmacy while under the influence of drugs, knocking one middle-aged man unconscious and leaving another permanently blinded in one eye.

He pleaded guilty to assault and was given a two-year sentence. He served 45 days.

"Being incarcerated was no place for me. But when I got out, it wasn't like I could just move to California. I still lived in the same environment.

"I decided that I was not going to run with the gang anymore and that's hard because when you live there and you are not with them, then you are against them.

"But it was time for me to turn my life around. When I started thinking positive and doing things, positive things started happening for me.

"If you are thinking negative the whole time, nothing is going to happen for you.

I had to go out and make things happen."

And how he has fulfilled his pledge.

stlife@sph.com.sg

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