Mark Wahlberg covers the latest issue of Cigar Aficionado. I didn’t even know that he smoked cigars, but I guess a lot of people are quietly smoking cigars and we don’t know until they appear in this magazine. The only reason I’m covering this is because Mark is seemingly previewing his retirement from acting. I honestly don’t remember the last time I saw him in anything… let me look at his IMDB… yeah, I haven’t seen any of his recent films, as he seems to be stuck doing family-oriented and churchy stuff in recent years. Apparently, he’s burned out on that stuff.
He won’t be an actor for much longer: “Well, I’m certainly working harder now than ever. Certain businesses, you kind of build them, pass them on or you exit. Hopefully my kids, we’ll see what their interests are, but I don’t think that I’ll be acting that much longer at the pace I am now. That’s for sure. Because that’s the most difficult thing.”
On Boogie Nights: “When I first heard about the film, the subject matter was not appealing to me. I came from the whole Marky Mark thing, pulling down my pants, Calvin Klein underwear – I didn’t know if this was just the next level of exploiting me and now all of a sudden we have to lose the underwear. My agents kept pushing me. So I read the first 25, 30 pages, and I kind of put it down. I was like this could be something great, or this could be absolutely terrible.”
Why he began producing: “I was always proactive in trying to find material and things that I could produce, that I knew was right for me, to create my own destiny. If I’m going to be in that position I’d rather be behind the wheel. You’re going 100 miles an hour down the highway, do you want to be in the back seat with no seatbelt or do you want to be behind the wheel?”
[Cigar Aficionado quotes via THR and MSN]
He keeps going on and on about his Boogie Nights regrets and I don’t get it at all – that film turned him from “a rapper with a side-gig in acting” to a bona fide A-list actor. And yes, I know that he committed hate crimes and he’s pretty much an awful person… but I always thought he was sort of talented as an actor. I’m no Wahlberg stan, but he’s a much better actor than most people realized, imo. But if the well is dry, so be it. As I said, he’s been making weird, cheesy family films lately and I get the impression that he’s just not seeing the scripts he’d like.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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