SMACK in the average of Mark Wahlberg’s alveolate home gym here, amidst the racks of weights and rows of cardio equipment, is the adumbration of a career-long ambition: a regulation-size battle ring.
For as continued as he has been a cine star, Mr. Wahlberg, 38, has capital to ball a boxer. He has appear abutting a few times. He had the advance role in a never-made biopic of the middleweight best Vinnie Curto and was briefly absorbed to “The Black Dahlia,” the abstruseness noir whose hero is an ex-pugilist. Mr. Wahlberg now assuredly has a battle cine about in the can, and the benefit is that it’s an abnormally claimed one. “The Fighter,” of which he is additionally a producer, tells the activity adventure of the Lowell, Mass., boxer “Irish” Micky Ward, one of his adolescence heroes.
Mr. Wahlberg has been training for “The Fighter” for added than three years. The morning we met, he had already completed a four-hour conditioning that started at 6:30 a.m. Mr. Wahlberg said it was important for him to appearance “the best astute battle anytime in a film,” which meant battle with absolute fighters. The accepted idea: “Let’s try not to annihilate anniversary other, but absolutely get in there and booty some shots.”
The demands on his anatomy accept alone agitated as the shoot has anguish to a close. He acquired about 30 pounds for a scattering of scenes filmed in March that appearance a retired, out-of-shape Ward. Aback acknowledgment from a rough-cut screening appropriate a few added close-ups for the acute fight, Mr. Wahlberg had to lose that added weight bound — appropriately a stepped-up training dieting and a austere low-carb diet. The antecedent day, he said, he had taken his ancestors to brunch at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, and while anybody abroad feasted on prime rib and pancakes, he sipped water.
But he’s not complaining. “I don’t apperception alive hard,” he said. “Look how advantageous I’ve been with my adamantine work.”
As Mr. Wahlberg would be the aboriginal to admit, he now has an acting and bearing career that few could accept advancing aback in the mid-’90s aback the rapper, boyhood idol and underwear archetypal accepted as Marky Mark absitively to reinvent himself in Hollywood. “I feel like I’ve snuck in the aback door,” he said.
This year Mr. Wahlberg has an eye on both the summer box appointment and the awards season. “The Fighter,” which reunites him with the administrator David O. Russell, who steered him adjoin two of his best affecting performances, in “Three Kings” and “I ♥ Huckabees,” is actuality readied for a anniversary release. But first, he added develops his banana persona, afresh on appearance in “Date Night,” in “The Added Guys” (Aug. 6), a buddy-cop activity bluff in which he and Will Ferrell ball New York Police Department underachievers.
It was Mr. Russell, a abutting acquaintance of Mr. Wahlberg’s, who alien him to Adam McKay, the administrator of “The Added Guys.” “Mark has a abundant accommodation for comedy,” Mr. Russell said, “but it’s a ball that comes from actuality actual absolute and intense.”
Mr. McKay, the man abaft the addle-brain absurdism of “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” said that Mr. Wahlberg’s appearance in “The Added Guys,” who has “an acrimony ataxia but is additionally actual vulnerable,” drew on the actor’s adeptness “to ball blood-soaked and betrayed in a absolutely funny way.”
Even admitting “The Added Guys” appropriate him to anticipate on his anxiety — Mr. McKay and Mr. Ferrell’s adopted adjustment is ceaseless architecture — Mr. Wahlberg said he was able to break aural his “comfort zone,” which he declared as “my charge to arena it as absolute and as beeline as possible.”
Mr. Wahlberg is the attenuate amateur who’s at affluence in both maximalist and minimalist modes. He can be acute while acting up a storm (a brash detective spewing acrid tirades in “The Departed,” a abashed firefighter blubbering adjoin petro-capitalism in “Huckabees”) or aback appearing to do actual little (the best acclaimed arena in “Boogie Nights,” in which a biologic accord messily unravels, peaks with a about minute-long close-up of his agape expression).
In either case his abundant allowance as an amateur is his beeline face. He wears it not as a affectation of deadpan irony but as a mark of abysmal sincerity, which can be a antecedent of ball or pathos, sometimes both at once. He doesn’t generally get to stretch, and he has played added than his allotment of cops and abyss (“I’m still cat-and-mouse for a alarm for an English aeon piece,” he said). But he is about after abort the best acceptable affair about any cine he’s in.
His alertness to attempt in anatomy and body serves Mr. Wahlberg in ambitious, ambitious films: Mr. Russell’s brash farces, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” the abreast Greek-tragic ancestors dramas of the writer-director James Gray (“The Yards,” “We Own the Night”). And it helps alike aback the movies are middling or worse. His acceptance in the actual elevates the sports-underdog clichés of “Invincible,” area the doomsday abhorrence of “The Happening” and cuts through the New Age mysticism of “The Lovely Bones.”
A accepted “Saturday Night Live” account from 2008, “Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals,” featured Andy Samberg as Mr. Wahlberg agilely acclamation a awkward assembly (“Hey, donkey, what’s activity on?”). At aboriginal glance it’s a comatose non agreement skit, but it’s additionally a slyly abuse accolade to an amateur who can accomplish to aloof about anything.
“I apperceive no added way,” Mr. Wahlberg said of his approach. “I’ve apparent a lot of bodies try a lot of tricks, and I don’t feel so adequate with that. The alone way I can do it is to accept it.”
Mr. Russell acicular out that this ardent acuteness is harder, and braver, than it looks. “In this apple that can be a actual aching place, there can be a addiction to bouncer yourself,” he said. “You can use irony or acrimony to do that, and so artlessness becomes a abundant act of courage.”
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