Eager for a fight

Wahlberg has been training for The Fighter for more than three years. The morning we met,he had already completed a four-hour workout that started at 6:30 a.m. Wahlberg said it was important for him to show the most realistic boxing ever in a film, which meant sparring with real fighters. The general idea: Lets try not to kill each other,but definitely get in there and take some shots.

The demands on his body have only intensified as the shoot has wound to a close. He gained nearly 30 pounds for a handful of scenes filmed in March that show a retired,out-of-shape Ward. When feedback from a rough-cut screening suggested a few more close-ups for the climactic fight,Wahlberg had to lose that extra weight quicklyhence a stepped-up training regimen and a strict low-carb diet.

Wahlberg now has an acting and producing career that few could have foreseen back in the mid-90s when the rapper,teen idol and underwear model known as Marky Mark decided to reinvent himself in Hollywood. This year Wahlberg has an eye on both the summer box office and the awards season. The Fighter,which reunites him with the director David O. Russell,who steered him toward two of his most affecting performances,in Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees,is being readied for a year-end release. But first,he further develops his comic persona,recently on view in Date Night,in The Other Guys August 6,a buddy-cop action spoof in which he and Will Ferrell play New York Police Department underachievers.

Wahlberg is the rare actor whos at ease in both maximalist and minimalist modes. He can be compelling while acting up a storm a hotheaded detective spewing salty tirades in The Departed,a conscience-stricken firefighter ranting against petro-capitalism in Huckabees or when seeming to do very little the most famous scene in Boogie Nights,in which a drug deal messily unravels,peaks with a nearly minute-long close-up of his dumbfounded expression. In either case his great gift as an actor is his straight face. He wears it not as a mask of deadpan irony but as a mark of deep sincerity,which can be a source of comedy or pathos,sometimes both at once.

The winning directness that is now Wahlbergs hallmark is perhaps the flip side,or the grown-up version,of the keep-it-real imperative that guided him as a rapping homeboy and,before that,as a teenage thug in working-class Boston. He spent six weeks in jail for assault when he was 17. In his early roles,the flexed pectorals and come-hither scowls of Marky Mark still imprinted in the pop-culture consciousness,he went through the bad-boy motions,playing Leonardo DiCaprios hoodlum sidekick in The Basketball Diaries and Reese Witherspoons seducer-stalker in Fear. Then came Boogie Nights,in which his wide-eyed busboy finds a calling and a community after assuming the nom de porn Dirk Diggler.

While he was always drawn to old-Hollywood actors with a blue-collar,regular-guy quality to them a poster of the James Cagney classic Angels With Dirty Faces hangs in his kitchen,he never thought of acting until the director Penny Marshall offered him a small part in the 1994 comedy Renaissance Man. For a long time Id been acting in my life anyway,whether conning my way into something or out of something, he said. I was always a fairly good salesman,and a fairly bad liar,so if I believed it,I could do a good job of convincing somebody else. Wahlberg has long been candid about his teenage delinquency. He set up a youth foundation in 2001,and he talks about being a role model for kids from similar backgrounds who can be creative and artistic and be considered cool, he said,adding that he was above all a devout Roman Catholic,a devoted husband and father of four.

Wahlbergs producing career continues to flourish: he produces the popular HBO series Entourage,and his Boardwalk Empire,a series about Atlantic City in the 1920s,is scheduled to start on HBO this fall,with a pilot directed by Martin Scorsese. But no amount of successnot even the Oscar nomination for best supporting actor he received for The Departedhas made him feel fully at home in the industry. His work ethic is bound up with the sense that he still has something to prove. I appreciate every opportunity Ive been given, he said. I want to show up early. I want to be the most prepared.

Preparation is an inadequate word for the herculean effort that has gone into The Fighter,a passion project that has an air of autobiography. Theres a lot Micky and I have in common: our willingness to work hard,to do whatever we have to do to achieve our goals, Wahlberg said.