Hitting his mark

LOS ANGELES -- Mark Wahlberg is dreading the idea of taking his mother to see his first major starring role in Boogie Nights, in which the 26-year-old Dorchester native plays a porn star named Dirk Diggler. "She said, `I was there for you, and I could come and visit you when you were in trouble or bail you out of jail, but when something good happens, you don't want me around?' I said, `No, that's not the case. There are other things I'm not too proud of, but I'm definitely proud of this one, but you should probably see it on your own.' She's one who speaks her mind, and if she starts smacking me and looking for Paul [Thomas Anderson, the film's writer/director] in the theater, that might not be a good thing."

Wahlberg's own story is familiar: at age 15, a mugger and stoner; at 16, a convict at Plymouth Penitentiary for the racially motivated beating of a Vietnamese man; at 18, a member (for five minutes) of his brother Donnie's superstar bubblegum combo New Kids on the Block; at 19, a hit rap star in his own right as Marky Mark; at 20, a top Calvin Klein underwear model; at 21, a has-been. Three years later, he'd surfaced as an actor, winning acclaim for tough-guy roles in The Basketball Diaries and Fear.

Perhaps it wasn't a stretch for him to play a semi-clad star with a meteoric rise and fall. Notes Wahlberg, "There were three things in the movie that I vowed I would never do in movies, which were sing, dance, and show my underwear, and those things all happened in the first act. But the material was one-of-a-kind. This was the first opportunity I had to go out and act and show a lot of different sides of me. It was like, if you don't do this, you're stupider than everybody thinks."

Not only does he show his underwear, but in the soon-to-be-notorious final shot, he shows Dirk's astonishing member. "I don't know if Paul clued you in, but [he whispers] it's actually his penis," quips Wahlberg of his cinematic prosthesis. "I'm still pursuing a personal life, and I want to get married, and I don't want to disappoint anybody."

So the kid who once dedicated a photo book to his own penis now sees it become the ostensible star of his big-break movie. "Accidents happen. It's a weird irony," he says of the book. "I made a joke, and the lady put it in there. In the back of my mind, I knew that's what a lot of people were focusing on."

Wahlberg says he won't be modeling underwear again, though he does have a new album in the can. His focus now, however, is acting. "I love making movies. But it's hard because there's not too much out there like this movie. I'm not interested in just making your average, everyday, happy-go-lucky films. I get bored really easily. Something like this or Basketball Diaries really sucks you in."

He says he'll probably keep choosing such offbeat, independent fare. "I just want to do something different every time. I'm not persuaded by the glitz and glamor. It's much more gratifying, and much more important if I want to grow as an actor, to do stuff that is real and has edge. I love to get ugly. It just makes me feel good at the end of the day to become something else and forget about all this stuff I'm dealing with in my own life.

Wahlberg says it's too painful to visit Boston often, except to see his family (he's the youngest of nine children). "It's just not the best place for me. I don't really want to go to Walpole State Prison to visit [my old friends]. It's really hard for me to be there, knowing that I could very well still be there.

"There's a line in one of my new songs: `A lot of people think I'm dissing Boston, but they just don't understand/Boston's the last place I want to be/'Cause memories of those days keep on haunting me.' "

The one redeeming element of his street-thug background is that it's made him convincing in tough-guy roles. (His next is a boxer from East Boston, with a trainer played by Robert De Niro, in Out on My Feet.) "You see a lot of people who have no real-life experience trying to play these parts, and you can see it all over their face, especially with younger actors. If I need to go back there mentally, I have no problem with it. For better or for worse, all my experiences have made me the person I am today. I'm not trying to forget where I came from. I just want to go other places."

-- Gary Susman