Mark Wahlberg is quite the romantic.
Fully onboard with his 18-year-old daughter Ella Rae's relationship with boyfriend James Stuart, the actor—who even wished the young couple a happy first anniversary in January—told E! News that he "couldn't be happier" for them.
"He's so kind, he treats her like the princess that she is," Wahlberg explained to E! New while doing press for his action hit Uncharted in February. "I'm more worried about him, 'cause she's tough! She drags me through the mud, I know she's gonna drag him through the mud. But he's a sweet kid and we're actually even doing stuff work-wise together."
In fact, the father of four hopes "this is one of those first-love, only-love, 60-year" relationships.
So it sounds as if there are more than two hearts on the line here! But if anyone abides by the adage of what's meant to be will be, it's Wahlberg, whose own journey to deeply committed family man and movie star from law-breaking kid and trouser-dropping face of the Funky Bunch would have sounded pretty unlikely 25 years ago.
"Nobody's beyond redemption," the 50-year-old told E! News at the recent junket for Father Stu, a six-years-in-the-making, based-on-a-true-story passion project for the star-producer that's now in theaters. Discussing his belief that God isn't one to hold a person's past screw-ups against them, he continued, "If He knows your heart and you want to do good, He will help you. He'll give you those things—but He's gonna give you all those things when you're ready for them. That's the same thing with my wife, with my children, and all the things that I've ever wanted. He didn't give them to me until I was ready for them."
Not that Wahlberg, a devout Catholic who credits his faith for helping him along the way in nearly every aspect of life, has stopped to rest on his laurels or anything, now that so much good fortune is his.
And if that involves going to bed when it's still light out, FaceTiming his sons to say goodnight when they're still on their way to football practice, so that he can be up hours before dawn to pray, work out and seize the day, so be it.
Even if his wife of 12 years, Rhea Durham, rolls her eyes once in awhile. Or frequently.
"Oh, she thinks it's ridiculous," Wahlberg admitted to E! in February when asked what his spouse, a former Victoria's Secret model, thought of his aggressive fitness regimen. "She's always thinking I'm doing way too much and I need to stop, and I'm way too into myself."
But after gaining 30 pounds (which included eating anywhere from 7,000 to 11,000 calories a day) to play real-life boxer turned priest Stuart Long in Father Stu, "I'm starting to feel good again," the Oscar-nominated actor said. "And it's good for you. I want to live a long time and I want to be able to keep up with my kids."
While Wahlberg's already giving Ella's boyfriend workout tips, son Michael, 16, is probably dating but hasn't brought anyone home to meet the parents—so "nothing serious yet, which is good," the Lone Survivor star noted. Brendan, 13, "just wants to hang out with his buddies and play football, basketball—and now he's playing golf. So they're much more into sports still." And his youngest, daughter Grace, 12, who rides horses and competes in dressage, isn't that far removed from giving her dad at-home makeovers and manicures when she isn't excelling at TikTok.
So with all those adolescents running around his still-full nest, Wahlberg does need his strength, mentally and physically.
"My son has just recently turned 16, let's just say that, and he gets embarrassed by everything that I do," he said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show April 12. "Even the stuff that other people think is, like, cool in 2022, like movies and stuff? 'Dad it's so dumb. Dad that's terrible.'"
To be fair, Michael may still have PTSD from hearing "Good Vibrations" blasted by the away team during his football game.
"It's the only song from 20-some-odd years ago that they're playing," Wahlberg recounted the moment on a 2018 episode of Sunday Sitdown With Willie Geist. "My wife's just cracking up laughing. She's looking at my son, who's burying his head in his helmet. It's fine for me, I don't want to make their life any more difficult. I think my past...it's not their burden."
Though he wouldn't mind if they were a little more interested in his present.
"My son and my daughter went to see Uncharted," he told Ellen DeGeneres of the action-adventure hit he co-starred in with 25-year-old whippersnapper Tom Holland. "They liked it a lot, but they were like, 'Dad, why didn't you play the main character?' I said, 'I'm too old to play the main character. I used to be the main character.'"
During the earlier days of the pandemic he screened a rough cut of Father Stu for the kids, and "it was a little much" for then-11-year-old Grace, Wahlberg shared. "They were into Transformers for a short amount of time. They were dying to see [the raunchy R-rated comedy] Ted, but my wife wouldn't let them see it. So, they're not my biggest fans."
Though judging by the occasional family photo he posts of his kids, splashing around in the pool or on a snowboarding trip for Michael's big 1-6 in March, they don't seem too mortified by their father. (Ella may have reached peak embarrassment when she was 13, anyway, when she had her iPhone temporarily taken away and then was in the studio to watch her dad make up a rap about discipline on The Dan Patrick Show, her frantic "cut it out!" gestures be damned.)
But while he and Durham, 43, may have kept a watchful eye on their screen time, they haven't avoided taking on tough real-world issues with their children when need be. When Wahlberg starred in 2016's Patriots Day, about the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon, he told E! News at the time that he felt Ella and Michael, then 13 and 10, were ready to see it.
"This is the reality of the world that we live in and I think it's important to understand that these things will happen, but we can't go run and hide," he said. "We have to stand up and fight back, and do that with love. I think ultimately that will make them better and stronger as people."
They were certainly of their own minds enough to flatly refuse to attend the Daddy's Home 2 premiere the following year, telling him, "'Dad, we'll see it whenever we see it,'" as Wahlberg shared on Late Night With Seth Meyers in 2017. "Then of course Will [Ferrell] shows up with his wife and the kids, and they're all in suits and dressed up. But you know, they just didn't want to go. The boys were watching football. My daughter is on the phone, doing her thing."
Asked if he thought his heyday as the cool dad was over, he replied, "It's been over. So now I don't make a point to embarrass them, but I'm not going to hide my affection for them, either. So they're like, 'Dad, drop us off in the alley at the school.'"
Forget it, Dad was walking them in. "'I'm getting a kiss in front of all your friends, and that's it,'" he quipped, describing the scenario. "But if they need something, if they want to meet Drake" or someone else he knows or could pull a few strings to arrange, "then they'll say, 'Oh yeah, Dad, we think you're cool for five minutes.'"
There's no buttering him up for a week beforehand, either, Wahlberg added. "They'll be nice for five minutes, and if they don't get what they want, when they want, they're just right back to not talking to me. But you know, they're kids, so I understand."
No wonder he's been so excited to bond with Ella's boyfriend—finally, someone wants to hang out with him!
However, now that his sons are getting into golf and he's an avid player—and is friends with lots of professional golfers and other athletes—"they're a little bit impressed with that," Wahlberg said on the April 10 episode of the Sunday Sitdown podcast. "But I think they are secretly impressed with my work ethic and my discipline. And I have to be an example for them, I have to show them that Dad's gonna get up and he's gonna do whatever he has to do. I could easily be complacent now that I've had success, but I'm more driven now and determined than I've ever been."
As for his faith, which is so central to his world, "I don't force it" on the kids, he told Hoda Kotb on Today April 7. "But they know that Dad can't start the day without being in prayer, can't start the day without reading my Scripture or going to Mass. And hopefully, instead of forcing that on them, they'll say, 'Well, if it works for Dad, maybe it'll work for us,' and they'll kind of gravitate towards it on their own."
In the meantime, he quipped, "They think Dad's crazy and he's boring."
At least Durham, his love for the last 21 years, has remained pretty sweet on him throughout (even when he's banished to the basement when the New England Patriots lose because she just can't take his surly attitude). They started dating in 2001 and welcomed Ella and Michael in 2003 and 2006, respectively, before tying the knot in a Catholic ceremony in Beverly Hills on Aug. 1, 2009.
"I owe a lot to my wife," Wahlberg, who grew up the youngest of nine siblings in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, told The Sun in 2018. "She has helped me become the man that I am and created a beautiful life for me and our children. I also knew that she loved me for who I am and that she was someone I could trust. Until I met her, I wasn't ready to have a family."
But he was raring to go when he did meet her.
In the August 2001 issue of Vanity Fair, Wahlberg, recently broken up with The Fast and the Furious star Jordana Brewster after a couple of years of dating off and on, lamented his weakness for casual flings. "I'm 30," he said. "I wish I was already married and starting to have a family."
It was hard to trust people "in this world in which I live and work," the future executive producer of Entourage (and inspiration for Adrian Grenier's frisky Vincent Chase) explained. Adding that both his humble beginnings and heady success made him a tough nut to crack, he admitted, "I don't make that very easy for [girlfriends], because I don't reveal everything. I've had a couple of bumps and bruises along the way, but because of that, I've also caused some bumps and bruises. I also know that if I continue to be this way, I won't allow myself to find all the things I need to be happy. I've had relationships, a couple years here and there, but I've never really lived with anybody. You gotta protect yourself, but when you do that, you set yourself up to miss out on unconditional love."
Not long after, he met Durham in New York and took her to Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral the next morning for their first date.
More important than anything else, Wahlberg told The Sun in 2018, "We share the same values. Obviously, the physical attraction was there, but that's not what keeps a couple together." (FYI, that attraction is still there, Wahlberg wishing his "total smokeshow" of a wife a happy birthday last July and calling her "an incredible mother to our four amazing children.")
But no matter how many movies he made or Wahlburgers locations he and his brothers opened (Sydney, Australia, just got one in February), "My mission in life is to raise my kids right," the actor shared. "With all the success I've had in the world, if I fail at that, my life means nothing. Raising your kids is the most challenging, but also the most rewarding role. I always try to instill in them as many positive values as I can and also try to lead by example in terms of working hard and being a good husband who takes his commitment to his family very seriously."
Being able to be fully present for his family while also "working a lot on Mark Wahlberg," as he put it on the recent Sunday Sitdown, is a lot of the reason why he basically lives a whole day before his wife and kids wake up. A few years after first letting the world in on his singular routine, he's still rising at 2:30 a.m. so he can pack in 15 minutes of prayer, a gym workout, business calls and a script read for whichever project he may be shooting that day before breakfast. (Though not his breakfast, because to maintain the shape he prefers to be in, he only eats within a six-hour window, and that doesn't start until later.)
"Then we get the kids up and I start the rest of the day," he told Geist. "And I know my wife especially finds it very annoying that, if I'm getting up at 2:30, I'm usually going to bed at 6:30. I need eight hours of sleep. Rest is the most important thing."
He will try to convince her to go to dinner with him at 4:30 p.m., though, so it's not as if they don't do date...afternoons.
However, Durham hardly spends her mornings sleeping in. She wrote in a 2015 blog post for People that her alarm went off at 5:15 a.m. on school days. Then, she shared, "I usually drag myself out of bed no later than 5:45 a.m. and give myself a few (and I mean only a few) minutes to brush my teeth, splash my face and get mentally prepared for the hustle."
The whole family would join Wahlberg on location as much as they could, Durham wrote, but the kids' increasingly busy schedules was what made that harder, so "during the times we can't be together, I am back home putting my time-management skills to work."
Wahlberg, meanwhile, shared with Geist in 2018 that on his day off (only 20 minutes of cardio and some stretching), he didn't get up until 3 a.m.
"I want to do my best work now, and I don't know how long I'll be able to do it for," he said. "It's a big sacrifice. I'm taking a lot of time away from my family, and that's hard to do, so I better be as focused and disciplined as I possibly can."
So long as he doesn't present it to them in song form, his kids just might be paying attention.