Mark Wahlberg Once Shared Why He Banned His Kids From Seeing ‘Transformers’
Mark Wahlberg’s sci-fi action series Transformers wasn’t as adult-oriented as some of his other films. Still, the actor had second thoughts about exposing Wahlberg to the films in their formative years.
Why Mark Wahlberg didn’t want his kids watching ‘Transformers’
Wahlberg picked up where LaBeouf left off with the Transformers franchise. The actor led the series in the commercially successful Transformers Age of Extinction, and also in its sequel The Last Knight. In an interview with CBS, Wahlberg asserted that the movie brought him back to his childhood years.
“It’s as much fun as you can ever imagine,” Wahlberg said. “Anybody who’s ever been a kid, playing with big things, this is exactly what it’s like. Blowing things up, shooting guns…It’s amazing.”
However, Wahlberg quickly learned that it might not have been a good idea to expose the movie to his kids just yet. The Michael Bay projects had language Wahlberg felt his kids were still too young to know.
“My four year old screamed ‘s***!’ the other day, when his brother knocked the football out of his hand,” Wahlberg once said according to Contact Music. “I almost laughed, but thankfully I was able to hold it in…I said, ‘Where did you hear that kind of language?’ and he looked up at me and said, Transformers. Then I told my wife, and we have the Transformers DVDs down in their room – so they’ve been taken away now. But I hope they get to see the new one.”
Mark Wahlberg was excited to do ‘Transformers’ because of his kids
Ironically, Wahlberg only did Age of Extinction because of his kids. At the time, he felt a feature like Transformers would be the kind of film they’d be into.
“Well, it was exciting because it was the first time my kids were really interested in a movie I was doing. Any time they see me with a gun, like Contraband or Pain & Gain, they want to see that, too, but they can’t because of the language and all that stuff,” Wahlberg once told Daily Beast. “But I loved working with Michael Bay, and I thought he had a really interesting way to make it new, different, and fresh. Plus, being in movies that have the potential to be hugely successful allows me to make smaller movies that I’m really passionate about.”
He also went into detail about what differentiated his Transformers movies from LaBeouf’s.
“It was a tighter script, and its own stand-alone thing,” he continued. “I think the emotional core of it, the human element, is going to be extremely powerful. It’s an ordinary man trying to do extraordinary things to save his daughter and keep her alive—and this boyfriend he didn’t know anything about. He’d had a child when he was in high school and his wife passed away, and the promise he’d made to her was that she wouldn’t date any boys until she graduated and that she’d be at the graduation—because we weren’t due to the pregnancy. So there’s an anchor to it and a realness to it that I like a lot.”
Mark Wahlberg didn’t see himself as the star of the ‘Transformers’ franchise
Transformers was different from Wahlberg’s usual action movies. The actor was used to either headlining his own summer blockbusters, or sharing top-billing with his other co-stars. But Wahlberg found himself sharing screen-time with CGI robots in the franchise. He didn’t mind the change, however, and instead embraced Bay’s vision.
“I’m always like everybody else, I just approach it as a piece of the puzzle where we’re all here to service Michael’s vision,” Wahlberg said to Collider. “It’s perfectly fine like that, I never look at it as more pressure or less pressure unless of course we’re telling a true story in a movie like a Lone Survivor where you have real people depending on you to get it right and do them justice, so there’s no pressure now.”
