Mark Wahlberg Once Shared That People Were Afraid of Him After Doing ‘The Basketball Diaries’

Mark Wahlberg’s 1995 feature The Basketball Diaries is highly regarded as one of the actor’s best movies. But Wahlberg shared that it had a brief influence on others’ perception of him.

Mark Wahlberg did movies that he would’ve never done after scaring people in ‘The Basketball Diaries’

The Basketball Diaries was one of Wahlberg’s first breakout roles as a film star. He was making his transition over to Hollywood after his brief stint as hip-hop artist Marky Mark. But his roles in The Basketball Diaries, and his subsequent film Fear, seemed to attach an unfavorable image to the actor.

“People were afraid of me after roles in Fear and Basketball Diaries,” Wahlberg once told Sun Journal.

In Basketball Diaries, Wahlberg played a young and mischievous troublemaker with a rebellious streak. In Fear, Wahlberg played the mysterious and intimidating boyfriend of co-star Reese Witherspoon. Given these two turbulent and dark roles, it’s not hard to see why others might’ve been unsettled by a younger Wahlberg. His checkered past might have also contributed to his reputation.

To help shed the image, Wahlberg turned to projects others might not have expected to see him in. Although they were the kind of projects he wasn’t necessarily interested in, and enjoyed little success.

“I did a lot of remakes that didn’t come across like I would have liked,” Wahlberg said. “I did Truth About Charlie because I wanted to work with the guy who directed Silence of the Lambs [Jonathan Demme] and I wasn’t really into the original Planet of the Apes but it was a chance to work with Tim [Burton, the director] and The Italian Job was the only script that had come along in a while that was a traditional character-driven movie.”

Leonardo DiCaprio originally didn’t want to work with Mark Wahlberg in ‘The Basketball Diaries’

Leonardo DiCaprio co-starred alongside Wahlberg as the lead character in the film. But working with Wahlberg wasn’t something DiCaprio looked forward to at the time. Wahlberg admitted that he once rubbed DiCaprio the wrong way during a prior meeting, which put them at odds with each other.

“Leonardo was like, ‘Over my dead f***ing body. Marky Mark’s not going to be in this f***ing movie,’” Wahlberg recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. “Because we’d had a thing — I didn’t even realize it, [but] I was a bit of a d*** to him at a charity basketball game. So he was like, ‘This f***ing ***hole is not going to be in this movie.’”

But the film’s casting director convinced DiCaprio to test with Wahlberg begrudgingly. DiCaprio was won over by his co-star’s audition.

“So I come in and I do the audition and I kind of look at him and he kind of looks at me, and then we do a scene, and they’re like, ‘Hmm, this f***ing dude’s pretty good, right?’” Wahlberg said. “The next thing you know, boom, we’re hanging out.”

Wahlberg and DiCaprio would cross paths again when they co-starred in 2006’s The Departed.

Mark Wahlberg initially didn’t have an interest in acting

Wahlberg seemed content with his career as a model and rap star leading the hip-hop group The Funky Bunch. Acting was never on his radar, but he did inherit his father’s passion for movies.

“My dad was a huge movie fan and he was also a teamster,” Wahlberg recalled to Huffpost. “I was the youngest of nine, so I would be home alone and my dad would come home after work and say, ‘Let’s go to the movies.’”

But with him already being a star, the film industry took notice. He was first offered a part as a white rapper in Whoopi Goldberg’s Sister Act 2, but he declined. But Wahlberg would soon be recruited for his first feature Renaissance Man, which was directed by Penny Marshall. Marshall would help convince Wahlberg to pursue acting professionally.

“Penny said, ‘Why don’t you want to act? You’re acting anyway. You’re acting like a tough guy. You should give it a try,’” Wahlberg remembered.