TOUGH HANG

Mark Wahlberg’s Hate Crime Past Dragged Back Into Spotlight by Ryan Murphy

The underwear model-turned-A-list actor probably won’t be joining Ryan Murphy’s coterie of stars anytime soon.

Ryan Murphy is famous for terrorizing viewers with Kim Kardashian attempting to act in last year’s All’s Fair, sensationalizing serial killers with his Monster franchise, and foisting Glee upon us.

He’s helped give steady work to underappreciated older actresses such as Angela Bassett (American Horror Story: Coven, 9-11), Jessica Lange (AHS Seasons 1 through 4 and Season 8) and Naomi Watts (The Watcher, Feud: Capote VS. The Swans, Love Story), who said that her Emmy-nominated part as Babe Paley in Feud was “the role of a lifetime.”

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He’s even managed to convince the likes of Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman to star in his Netflix movie Prom. The more left unsaid about that, the better.

One movie star who won’t be appearing in a Murphy effort any time soon is Mark Wahlberg.

In Murphy’s latest effort, the much-anticipated Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, premiering Feb. 12 on FX on Hulu, the actor is name-dropped in the offices of Calvin Klein, where Bessette, played chameleonically by Sarah Pidgeon, worked before her marriage to Kennedy Jr. in the 1990s.

Klein also gave Wahlberg his big break, plastering his tighty-whitey-clad crotch, which he suggestively grabs in one ad, all over American fashion magazines and billboards and catapulting him to notoriety outside of his burgeoning rap career as a member of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

“Who picks a fight with Madonna?” ponders the eponymous designer, played by Alessandro Nivola, referring to the 1993 incident in which Wahlberg allegedly broke the nose of record executive Guy Oseary and called a member of Madonna’s entourage a “homo.”

When the label’s legal counsel expresses concern about the effect removing Wahlberg from their campaign will have on its bottom line, our heroine Bessette speaks up, sarcastically calling Wahlberg “practically Harvey Milk” for not using the f-slur.

Wahlberg had apparently resented the attention his underwear ad had diverted from his music and, in particular, his new gay male fan base.

“I didn’t realize Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch were plotting global domination,” Klein says snarkily.

“Did he think all those men were just fans of s--tty hip hop?” Bessette retorts.

The label ultimately decides to remove Wahlberg from the campaign, in which he modelled alongside newcomer Kate Moss and, later in the season, replaces him with Bessette’s one-time lover, Michael Bergin (Noah Fearnley).

The Daily Beast has reached out to Wahlberg’s representative for comment.

In our post-#MeToo, Epstein files-present landscape where consequences for abusive behavior are fleeting if exacted at all, Love Story reminds us of the Daddy’s Home actor’s documented history of bigotry and violence dating back to his teen years growing up in Boston.

In 1986, a 16-year-old Wahlberg racially abused a group of Black children while pelting them with rocks. He was found guilty of violating their civil rights. Two years later, when Wahlberg was 18, he was charged with and served 45 days of a two-year sentence for the attempted murder of two Vietnamese-American men, to whom he also shouted racist epithets.

And a year prior to the Madonna incident, in 1992, Wahlberg and his bodyguard allegedly kicked and punched a 20-year-old man, leaving him with a broken jaw.

Our foggy collective memory of Wahlberg’s abuse was revived in 2023 when he presented the Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award (since renamed the Actor Awards ceremony as of next month’s event) to the majority Asian ensemble of Everything Everywhere All At Once. Viewers were quick to point out the unfortunate irony, given his hate crime history against Asian-Americans.

In 2014, Wahlberg sought a pardon for the 1986 attacks, stating that he had dedicated himself “to becoming a better person and citizen” in the years since.

Though it doesn’t look like Murphy has any connection to Wahlberg, it is curious that the actor is one of the few big stars who have never orbited his prolific output. As a gay man growing up in the 1980s who worked as a reporter before pivoting to Hollywood, it’s likely that Wahlberg’s early indiscretions left a (marky) mark on Murphy.

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Scarlett Harris

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