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Look who’s back! Mark Wahlberg pumps up local film industry

Mark Wahlberg back in 2014 for <i>Transformers</i>, still calls Australia home when work and play and business ventures come calling.

Mark Wahlberg back in 2014 for Transformers, still calls Australia home when work and play and business ventures come calling. Photo: Getty

Months after calling Australia home during a family work holiday stay in a $100 million Sydney Harbour-side mansion, Hollywood heavyweight Mark Wahlberg is heading back Down Under.

The 53-year-old Boston-born Ted and Father Stu actor flew to Australia in March to spend months filming Amazon crime series Play Dirty.

In between shoots on the upper North Shore, Wahlberg was spotted about town, dropping into his eponymously named restaurant chain, playing golf at the Moore Park Golf Club and visiting St Mary’s Cathedral and St Mary Magdalene’s in Rose Bay.

“Faith, golf and tequila,” were his hot topics – in that order – when he spoke to the Daily Telegraph about his long-term stay.

“That is the kind of foundation of my entire existence,” Wahlberg, whose career began as a rapper in the band Marky Mark in 1991, said of his faith.

“I had a very challenging upbringing and when I started to really focus on my faith, good things started to happen.

“I am a creature of habit and I just continue to gravitate toward that. It is the thing that has helped me balance my entire life and prioritise my life in a way that has helped me be successful both professionally and personally.”

Now that creature of habit is returning to Australia to film action comedy Balls Up. He will star alongside Paul Walter Hauser (The Instigators), with a screenplay from the writers of Deadpool and Wolverine.

Screen Queensland announced recently it had secured the feature film through its Production Attraction Strategy. Cameras are set to roll in Brisbane and the Gold Coast this month.

Boss Jacqui Feeney said the Amazon MGM Studios and Skydance production would generate an estimated $64.8 million for the state’s economy, employing about 250 local cast and crew, as well as boosting the books of small businesses.

Balls Up joins a lengthy list of feature film productions in Queensland in the past year, including Ron Howard’s Eden, The Bluff, Good Cop/Bad Cop and Australian productions Dangerous Animals, Black Snow, Rock Island Mysteries and Gettin’ Square sequel, Spit.

Skydance’s Brad Carlson said several factors influenced the decision to make Balls Up in Queensland.

“With its wide variety of urban and rural locations, coupled with a robust incentive program and talented crew base, Queensland was the perfect choice to base our production,” he said.

How many times can you watch Ted, voiced by Seth MacFarlane with Mark Wahlberg and not be grateful. Photo: Universal Pictures 

Redemption and success

One of a handful of actors who successfully made the transition from teen pop idol to Hollywood movie star, Wahlberg grew up in the working-class suburb of Dorchester.

He was one of nine children crammed into a three-bedroom apartment.

He dropped out of high school at 14 to pursue a life of petty crime and drugs, working on the odd drug deal before treating himself to the substances, according to a lengthy IMDb profile.

At 16, he was convicted of assaulting two Vietnamese men after he tried to rob them. He was sentenced to 50 days in prison at Deer Island Penitentiary.

While there, Wahlberg began working out and, when he was released, he had gone from being a scrawny kid to a buff young man. He credits the jail sentence as his motivation to improve his lifestyle and leave crime behind.

His brother Donnie got him a recording contract – despite not being able to sing – and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch was born. Wahlberg was a bad-boy rapper who danced in his boxers.

He was constantly in the headlines after multiple scandals.

When the story of his arrest for assault (and allegations of racism) became public, things took a decidedly darker note.

Marky Mark was suddenly embroiled in allegations of brutality, homophobia and racial hatred.

Mark Wahlberg regrets dedicating his 1992 memoir, Marky Mark, to his penis. Photo: Boogie Nights

Not giving up, he pivoted to acting.

His first big screen role was Renaissance Man and critics began to see a decent actor, not a damaged rapper, with a big future. He blew them away in the controversial The Basketball Diaries and in Fear.

The major turning point in Wahlberg’s career came with the role of troubled porn star Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights. He then went on to star in critically acclaimed dramas such as Three Kings and The Perfect Storm, and popcorn flicks such as Planet of the Apes, Contraband and Transformers: Age of Extinction.

His work ethic continues to astound. Wahlberg has starred in and produced six feature films in the past year, with another 12 either optioned or in development.

When he finds similar digs to Point Piper on the Goldie, Wahlberg – who has four children with wife Rhea Durham – will start filming at Village Roadshow Studios.

He and Hauser play American marketing executives who are fired up to blow a client sponsorship opportunity. They decide to use their free tickets to a major soccer match, but their drunken debauchery leads them to be hunted across the country.

As he told the DT, he’s “very committed to doing things the good old-fashioned way, by rolling up our sleeves and doing the work”.

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