Among a certain ironic internet crowd, one of Mark Wahlberg’s most beloved performances is in the bizarre 2008 M. Night Shyamalan thriller The Happening. That movie is an all-timer of a Hollywood trainwreck; scenes of the actor asking for a second to think or talking to a plastic tree have taken on their own kind of chat room notoriety. One classroom scene, though, is particularly endearing: Wahlberg was trying, with only limited success, to embody a gentle science teacher. (“Come on buddy, take an interest in science! What could be the reason bees are vanishing?”) Later, he would acknowledge that the movie had been a dud, but defended the effort. “Fuck it—you can’t blame me for wanting to try to play a science teacher,” he told reporters. “At least I wasn’t playing a cop or a crook.”
Wahlberg had come a long way since he started out as a rapper and underwear model, but 10 years into his career, he’d fallen into a rut. In his five movies before The Happening, he had portrayed, in order, a police officer, an assassin, a police officer, a football player, and a street criminal. His attempt to play a friendly high-school teacher was undercut by his irrepressible jock energy, but you can’t blame a guy for trying.
These days, Mark Wahlberg is trying to reinvent himself again, playing a villain for the first time since his very first leading role, the 1996 thriller Fear. In Flight Risk, which opened on Jan. 24 and topped the weekend box office, Wahlberg plays a balding killer—the fake hairpiece is exposed in the same moment as his evil intent—piloting a small plane carrying a U.S. marshal and a federal witness under her watch. The plot doesn’t really require him to play the character as a flamboyant psychopath, giggling about the “good time” he’s going to have with his victims; Flight Risk seems to be merely a vehicle for Wahlberg to try something out of his comfort zone, even as it remains in his familiar punching-people milieu.
In one specific way, though, the film seems to clarify something about where the 53-year-old actor is at this point in his career, at this volatile time in Hollywood and in America. Flight Risk is directed by Mel Gibson, once persona non grata in Hollywood for his antisemitic, misogynistic, and racist comments. Wahlberg’s work with Gibson doesn’t necessarily mean that the actor has thrown his lot in with the MAGA Hollywood scene. But it does suggest that Wahlberg, who himself has had to make amends for juvenile hate crimes, is no longer anxious about polite public opinion. And that may make some kind of dark sense in this moment of conservative resurgence in popular culture. As Hollywood’s reckoning with racism and misogyny fades into memory, and men like Gibson can reemerge into the spotlight, it may just be ideal for the ascendance of Wahlberg’s composite film persona, a sort of avatar for anti-intellectual masculinity: a man of faith, muscles, robust heterosexuality, rough edges, a simple moral code, and few thoughts.
Wahlberg first rose to fame as rapper Marky Mark, of the Funky Bunch, who scored a No. 1 hit in 1991 with “Good Vibrations.” (The Funky Bunch’s instant success had a lot to do with the then-inescapable power of Mark’s brother Donnie’s group, New Kids on the Block.) Soon his sculpted torso was inescapable—in a series of black-and-white Calvin Klein underwear ads, on the cover of Penthouse, in a two-page Annie Leibovitz spread in Vanity Fair. His most iconic early roles in Hollywood played off that himbo image in interesting ways: He portrayed a hot-but-menacing teenage psychopath in Fear, a sweetly naïve adult film star in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, and a charming fool of an Army sergeant in David O. Russell’s war comedy Three Kings.
But as he got more famous, his roles became more rigid, as directors realized how ideal his unflagging personal intensity made him for action parts—or, less charitably, how limited his meathead humorlessness made him for any other kind of character. With a couple of minor exceptions, he spent the next decade of his career playing out different masculine archetypes and fantasies: cop, soldier, fisherman, astronaut, football player. He leaned hard on his bad-boy street cred, his abs, and his working-class background. Wahlberg, it seemed, recognized the limits of his range, and tried to work with it: He nabbed an Oscar nomination under the direction of Martin Scorsese, who cast him as a tough-talking South Boston police officer in The Departed, dialing up his tendency toward expletive-filled fury to play off a larger ensemble cast. His critical failures came when less skilled directors either tried to contort him out of his tough-guy range (as with The Happening) or stretched his grittiness as a single flat note (as in the neo-noir Max Payne). But he had become, undeniably, a franchise-level star, seen as a strong bet to lead, for example, the rebooted Planet of the Apes.
Toward the end of the aughts, though, he seemed to realize he had become a bit of a parody of himself. He started doing comedies to soften his stiff image, at first as parodies of his standard roles: angry cop, hunky security expert, a motorcycle-riding emblem of red-meat masculinity. (This paid off reputationally and financially in his casting as an affable slacker in the 2012 comedy Ted, which trails only his Transformers films in box-office performance.) Oscar nomination in hand, he began taking on prestige roles, playing the father of a murdered girl in 2009’s The Lovely Bones. Meanwhile, he continued his buddy-cop action flicks, his Southie sports movies, his blue-collar disaster films, his robot-battling franchise blockbusters. By the end of the decade, he had cemented his status as a big-budget movie star, the kind of guy who can pull in an audience based on the power of his name alone. It was the kind of power that might go to a guy’s head. In a 2012 interview, Wahlberg said of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: “If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did.”
But Wahlberg had always been confident in his own physical abilities, and in the mindset it takes to maintain them. He rarely failed to mention, as part of his explanation for his work ethic—a rise-and-grind guy, Wahlberg started working out at 4 a.m. every day—his blue-collar background. He tended, however, to leave out the roughest parts of his biography: the time when a 15-year-old Wahlberg chased after three Black children while yelling “kill the n—,” and the day when the 16-year-old Wahlberg, in two separate incidents, assaulted two Vietnamese American men. (In the first incident, Wahlberg and two other white boys were issued a civil rights injunction—a warning, essentially—and in the incidents the next year, Wahlberg was convicted of assault and served 45 days in prison.)
In his middle age, facing a new reality in Hollywood in which the power of the movie star is on the wane, Wahlberg appears to be finally grappling with the notion that he might be a man in need of a little redemption. In 2022, Wahlberg self-financed Father Stu, the biopic of a rough, swearing boxer turned rough, swearing priest. Wahlberg, who heard the story of the real-life Stu at a dinner with two Catholic priests, marketed the film as a true passion project—if anyone doubted his commitment, he gained 30 pounds in six weeks for the role, drinking glasses of olive oil to reach his calorie requirements—and his most important role to date. “We are not going to turn our backs on people because of mistakes that they’ve made,” he told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “We are going to tell people and encourage people that nobody is beyond redemption.”
But more than that, he said, it had come as a calling from God to use his fame to start spreading Jesus’ message. “If this is a movie that really changes people’s lives and motivates them and inspires them to do great things,” he mused—“you know, all I really gotta do is convert one person, and I get to go through the pearly gates.” He had plans to pursue even more Christian projects, he said. He partnered with Hallow, the popular Catholic prayer app, appearing as its face in an ad in last year’s Super Bowl. Mark Wahlberg, it seemed, had decided to become a Christian Actor.
Hollywood has plenty of A-listers who have spoken publicly of their faith. But a select few decide to create professional personas based around the countercultural nature of their outspoken Christian beliefs. The supposed edginess of the Christian Actor stems from the idea that in godless Hollywood it’s somehow taboo to be religious, and that an openly Christian actor will face some kind of retaliation. (In terms of known backlash, this only seems weakly true for people, such as Chris Pratt, who have been accused—in his case, falsely—of attending churches with anti-LGBTQ views.) This retaliation is inevitable because, as they see it, being a Christian compels you to hold beliefs that are counter to those held by most in Hollywood. (This conflates being a Christian, which means many different things to different people, with holding traditional conservative values on matters of sexuality and gender.) Some actors who lean heavily on the Christian Actor shtick include Kevin Sorbo, Kirk Cameron, and, of course, Mel Gibson.
If you watched Father Stu, it would be easy to see signs of Wahlberg going this route. In one scene, for example, Stu, then an aspiring actor, visits a casting director who propositions him for oral sex. An appalled Stu punches him out, and we’re encouraged to view this not only as a strike at the man’s behavior and sexual orientation, but at the abusive and immoral ways of the industry itself.
Notably, the actor who plays Stu’s alcoholic father, desperately in need of redemption and of his own son’s grace, is none other than Mel Gibson. There’s precedent for Gibson taking on a kind of mentor/elder statesman role with a fellow actor who’s leaning into his Christianity. Gibson has served as a kind of Catholic mentor to Shia LaBeouf, who converted last year after making his own 2022 Catholic priest movie, Padre Pio. Gibson has some bizarrely specific qualifications for this, beyond directing The Passion of the Christ. Gibson’s father, the writer Hutton Gibson, was a leading proponent of the idea that the Second Vatican Council was a “Masonic plot backed by the Jews” and that therefore all popes since then have been antipopes. The younger Gibson is an outspoken traditionalist, criticizing the modern church loudly and making friends with dissident clerics; he has even erected a private traditionalist Catholic chapel in the Santa Monica mountains. His influence paid off: LaBeouf promptly started sharing his feelings about the Latin Mass and plans to become a deacon.
When Wahlberg started appearing on morning shows bearing the forehead cross of Ash Wednesday, it was easy to see Gibson’s mark. And Wahlberg’s association with Gibson certainly has some people thinking he’s joining Gibson’s and the right wing’s culture wars. (A satire site’s claim that Wahlberg and Gibson were launching a “non-woke film production studio” proved popular enough that it was addressed by multiple fact-checks.) People will see a Hollywood actor playing cops and soldiers and blue-collar heroes and promoting a prayer app and assume him to be conservative. That’s not quite right for Wahlberg, who just two years before Father Stu starred in a movie about a grieving father grappling with his failure to support his gay son. He may be forging a career as a Christian Actor, but he hasn’t yet hitched his wagon to the conservative Christian movement. He doesn’t even seem interested in the internecine doctrinal debates that are Gibson’s bread and butter. Instead, he seems simply to be a kind of Wahlberg character—just a guy rising, grinding, praying, and not thinking too hard about things.
That’s just fine, to an extent. But when you make movies with Mel Gibson, you’re risking your neutrality turning into complicity. During Flight Risk, Wahlberg’s villain relishes making cartoonish sexual threats not only to the female U.S. marshal but to the male witness she’s escorting. In this second Trump era, amid a conservative cultural resurgence, there’s something distastefully retrograde in seeing a Mel Gibson–directed movie starring a onetime A-lister in which the villain’s depravity is displayed through his indiscriminate sexual impulses.
So what’s Wahlberg to do? It’s unlikely that being a Catholic will limit who he can work with in Hollywood, but wanting to make Catholic movies surely will. Maybe he can continue walking the line—in interviews for Father Stu, he spoke simply of faith and the comfort it brings, avoiding actually contentious Catholic, or political, matters. (Unlike Gibson, he says he loves Pope Francis.) Nor does he traffic in harsh comments about Hollywood lifestyles. He did tell a Catholic crowd that he prayed for God’s forgiveness for appearing in Boogie Nights, but he later clarified that he didn’t really mean it.
But it’s hard to imagine him walking that tightrope easily if he walks alongside Gibson. If he somehow succeeds, it’ll likely be through his absolute commitment to presenting as a simple product of his background: an Irish Catholic guy from South Boston, the same lovable meathead he’s always been. In one particularly delightful video for National Prayer Day, he popped on a backward cap and urged his followers to “stay prayed up.” Luckily for Wahlberg, he’s never compelled us to overthink it.
