Valerie Macon/Getty ImagesMark Wahlberg is not—we repeat, not!—feuding with Tom Cruise.
As you may have heard Wahlberg was asked recently what he thought of actors comparing acting to being at war in Afghanistan. Wahlberg raged against unnamed actors in a cuss-filled response.
The question seemed to have been prompted by a report that Cruise said during a legal deposition that being away from his daughter Suri while filming a movie was like a solder's tour in the Middle Eastern country.
"I know Tom would never say that," Wahlberg told me at the Governors Awards. "Tom Cruise has the utmost respect for the military. It's just a huge misunderstanding."
In fact, Cruise's lawyer later explained that his superstar client actually said acting and war are far from comparable.
Wahlberg blamed the blowup on what he says is the media's focus on the negative.
"Nobody's celebrating anything good that anybody's doing," Wahlberg said, adding, "What happened to be people being supportive of each other, encouraging people to do great things."
Wahlberg said training for his new movie, Lone Survivor, with real Navy seals was "sobering and humbling."
"There's no place to complain," he said. "You just do what they say when they say it and the way they say to do it. And if you don't, you usually get grabbed by the back of the head and you get put back down there and they tell you to do it again."
Lone Survivor (in theaters on Jan. 10) is director Peter Berg's adaptation of Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell's account of his Navy SEALS mission in Afghanistan in July of 2005. Wahlberg's costars include Ben Foster and Emile Hirsch and Taylor Kitsch.