School of hard knocks

MARK Wahlberg, it seems, was destined to take on the role of junior welterweight ‘Irish’ Micky Ward in his critically lauded new film, The Fighter.

“I was selfishly wanting to play this part for a very long time and was friends with Micky for years and promised him I was going to get it done,” says the 39-year-old American actor, “and putting on that belt is a childhood fantasy.”

The former rapper recalls the moment he saw his first boxing movie. “When I came out of seeing Rocky as a kid, I think I ran all the way from the theatre,” he laughs, “imagining that kids were chasing me and the crowd’s getting bigger and bigger until I got to the museum. But Micky Ward’s story, that’s personal for me.”

Both men grew up in Massachusetts, in large, working class families. “Micky’s journey is very much like mine,” continues Wahlberg. “The only difference is I am in the entertainment business and he is an athlete. But other than that, we grew up 30 minutes from each other, both from a family of nine, and both had to overcome a lot of obstacles to achieve our goals and pursue our dreams.”

Charting Micky’s true-life story, the film begins with Micky’s older brother, Dicky (Christian Bale), once a top fighter himself, who went toe-to-toe with Sugar Ray Leonard, but who has fallen on hard times. “The film is more than just a boxing movie,” says Wahlberg. “It’s about the life that they went through, Micky and his older brother, Dicky, who was supposed to be champion — he was idolised and everyone kind of overlooked Micky. But Dicky became addicted to drugs, became a crack addict, and went crazy after losing to Sugar Ray Leonard in his first big fight.”

The always-excellent Bale, who earned Golden Globe, BAFTA and Oscar nominations for his performance, plays Dicky Ward in the film. For all the praise heaped upon his co-stars, it is Wahlberg, however, who arguably emerges with most credit. He has floundered in some of his recent movies — most notably in the supernatural dramas The Happening (2008) and The Lovely Bones (2009) — but The Fighter represents something of a career comeback.

As with his early and arguably his best performance, as naive porn star Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights (1997), he blends physicality with emotional delicacy. He is passionate about the film, too, spending almost five years trying to get the project up and running, and seeing the likes of Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Darren Aronofsky come and go. “It took me years to get this movie made, but it was worth it,” he says.

Wahlberg is enthusiastic about Ward’s rise in the boxing world. “Dicky ends up going to prison and when he goes inside, Micky starts training hard, and when Dicky is out, he starts training Micky and gets him to a title fight and he beats Shea Neary in London, who had never been beaten and never been put down. That championship defence was supposed to be a walk in the park for Shea.”

Wahlberg knows everything about Ward. “At one point in his story the cops were beating Micky up and they smashed his hands with billy-clubs, so he couldn’t fight. He had fragments of his hip taken out to restructure his hand and he was still taking on fights he was expected to lose but he then started winning. We shot the movie down and dirty; it’s emotional and funny in places.”

The direction by David O Russell, who tackles his third collaboration with Wahlberg following Three Kings (1999) and I Heart Huckerbees (2004), allows the characters enough space to find the humour. “The laughs come out of unusual things,” Wahlberg notes. “We wanted to make the most commercial version of a real story — because it’s such a dark story, you need to try and bring some light. He fulfils his dream by coming the champion. It doesn’t change his world dramatically. It’s very real and that’s what people respond to; he still lives with the same woman in the same town.”

That town, Lowell, Massachusetts, is an important part of the story. Micky’s upbringing was a tough one that Wahlberg understands all too well. The actor’s parents divorced when Wahlberg was 11 years old, and he slipped into a rogues’ life, using cocaine by the time he’d hit his teens.

At the age of 16 he served time for one of a number of vicious racially-motivated assaults. He emerged from Deer Island Correctional Center with a newfound dedication to Catholicism. “I think that delinquency starts in the home, people listening to hip-hop,” he says of his former life. “And I’ll tell you, there’s not a way in hell that God puts me in the position I’m in now so I can forget about where I come from. For me, getting out of jail, it was hard to survive in my neighbourhood if you were no longer one of the ‘guys’.

“I grew up in a tough neighbourhood and it’s cool if you’re playing a tough guy, but playing the vulnerable guy, the pussy, the guy who doesn’t win and the end and who doesn’t get the girl, that was always a worry when I was younger. I wanted approval from my peers back home and respect from guys in general. But as an actor you’ve got to be able to do different things.”

Wahlberg has conquered his demons — golf is his new passion, along with his burgeoning family. He and model Rhea Durham have been together since 2001, marrying in 2009 and they have two girls and two boys. Wahlberg’s subsequent professional output, meanwhile, has seen him blend action (The Italian Job, 2003; Shooter, 2007; Max Payne, 2008) with drama (The Perfect Storm, 2000; We own The Night 2007) and even comedy (The Other Guys, 2010). He has also worked with cinematic heavyweights like PT Anderson (Boogie Nights, 1997), Tim Burton (Planet of the Apes, 2001) and Martin Scorsese (The Departed, 2006). As executive producer he helped launch the hit TV show Entourage, which is loosely based on his early experiences in Hollywood.

“I’m not the kind of guy who gets offered everything under the sun,” he concludes. “I’m usually aggressively pursuing material that someone else probably had an opportunity to do, but I’ve learned a lot. I learn something every day from meeting people, my kids and my job. This career path has afforded me a great education out of school and I’m pretty damn happy. If it all ended tomorrow, I look at my life like an athlete, and you just play to your peak.”

A bit like Micky Ward? “Exactly,” he smiles, “just like Micky Ward.” It’s a role Wahlberg was destined to play.

* The Fighter is released on February 2.