Last March, Mark Wahlberg was voted the first recipient of
Acculturated’s “Celebrities Behaving Well Award,” stemming from my
earlier article about his decision, at the
age of 41, to return to school for his high school diploma. I’ve written also praising Wahlberg for his
very vocal appreciation for our military. Now, at the risk of becoming
Acculturated’s resident Mark Wahlberg fanboy, here I am again, praising the very
busy actor/producer for steering himself out of juvenile delinquency to become
one of Hollywood’s most upstanding, prominent role models.
In his working-class
youth in
Boston, Wahlberg was essentially a petty
thug: on drugs at thirteen, constantly
in trouble with the law, a high-school dropout, convicted of assault. He makes
no excuses for that troubled start: “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my
life and I’ve done bad things,” he once said.
“But I never blamed my upbringing for that. I never behaved like a victim so
that I would have a convenient reason for victimizing others. Everything I did
wrong was my own fault. I was taught the difference between right and wrong at
an early age. I take full responsibility.”
His short jail
time for assault (45 days of a two-year sentence) was enough to scare him straight:
“I said to myself, no matter what I was going to do, I was gonna make an
honest living. I was gonna do something that I could be proud of and I could
make my parents proud.”
In a recent CBS
News interview to promote Wahlberg’s new Transformers flick, the interviewer points out that Esquire described him as having the driven
work ethic of “a man with a dark past who was granted a second chance.”
Wahlberg responded simply, “This is America”:
Once I got a second chance, I was never gonna do anything to mess it up.
And I feel so fortunate to do what I do. It’s only right that I give it
my all and I respect what I do and the people that I work with. I’m gonna
deliver for them. People are taking chances on me. I make sure that I deliver.
The Esquire
profile to which the interviewer referred is “Mark Wahlberg: The Modern Fatherhood of a
Street Kid” in the June/July 2014 issue, which highlights
the married, 43-year-old actor’s work ethic and his very hands-on relationship with
his two boys and two girls, aged four to ten. Of fatherhood, he says:
I think the most important thing is
to always be involved in every aspect of their life. To give them enough trust
that they can share things with you. I don’t want them to be terrified of me,
you know? But I don’t want them to think they can do whatever they want and get
away with it, either, because they can’t.
As a father of
daughters, I appreciate his honesty and sense of humor about raising girls. In
the CBS interview, the interviewer noted that in Transformers: Age of Extinction, Wahlberg plays a dad trying to
save his daughter: “You’re a pretty protective dad in real life –”
“Worse. Far
worse. I don’t plan on ever letting my daughters date,” Wahlberg half-joked. “I’m
going to try to do everything I can to prevent it. You know, it just terrifies
me. It just terrifies me. I know what guys are like – what I was like until I became the father of a daughter.”
Considering his rough beginnings, Wahlberg, who attends
Catholic mass every morning and takes the family on Sundays, is now concerned
about the impact his massive success will have on his own kids:
The biggest thing for me is, you
know, as quickly as I was able to turn it around, to get from there to here,
from me having nothing as a kid to me here now, providing everything for
my kids, it’s like, I worry that maybe they won’t appreciate things. I worry
that maybe they’ll have a sense of entitlement. You don’t wanna give your kids
everything without giving them the tools to be great people.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 7/10/14)
