How the hulks muscled out Hollywood’s leading men
As these three become the highest paid actors on the big screen …
WAHlBERG, Johnson and Diesel might sound like an accountancy firm or perhaps a specialist car dealership, but in fact, as most movie buffs know, these are the names of the three best-paid film stars in the world.
last week, the U.S. business publication Forbes magazine identified 46-year-old Mark Wahlberg as the world’s most handsomely remunerated actor. His earnings over the last 12 months have been calculated at a staggering £52.6 million, nudging Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, last year’s leading man, into second place. Johnson made £50 million. Third on the Forbes list, having earned £42 million since the summer of 2016, is one Vin Diesel.
Some of you will say, Vin who? Quite a few might also wonder who on earth Dwayne Johnson is and even strain to picture exactly what Mark Wahlberg looks like. Being told that he was formerly the rapper known as Marky Mark won’t necessarily help.
Even if you scoff at such pop- cultural innocence, not even their greatest fans could claim that these gilded men are giants of the silver screen to compare with the likes of Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman and Robert Redford, who were the leading film actors 40 years ago, still less with Cary Grant, James Stewart and Humphrey Bogart, who towered over the industry a generation before that.
How things have changed. Grant owed his stardom, and the riches that came with it, to immense elegance, debonair wit and urbane charm. For Stewart, it was an irresistibly likeable everyman quality, while Bogart radiated dangerous charisma.
Perhaps the three movie stars now who most evoke that marvellous trio are George Clooney, Tom Hanks and Robert De Niro. But they are e not the really whopping earners on the Forbes s list. Rather, it is three averagely decent actors s all with pretty much the same pair of principlee attributes, namely, enormous biceps.
That applies especially to Diesel and the former wrestling champion Johnson, who not only look as if they were hewn from granite, but also have perfectly matching, gleamingly bald pates, and basso-profondo voices.
They both sound like molten gravel might, if f it could speak.
So what has happened to the movie industry?? How has it come about that these three alpha males have, quite literally, been able to muscle their way to the top?
Rather tragically, for a business fashionedd out of dreams and fantasies, it boils down to a lack of imagination. Wahlberg, Johnson and d Diesel all loom large in high-octane, frenziedly y energetic action- movie franchises thatt Hollywood pumps out in an almost demented d chase for box-office dollars. Wahlberg is the star of the Transformerss films, sci-fi extravaganzas inspired by y a popular children’s toy. Johnson and d Diesel flex their pecs in the Fast and Furious movies, which are loosely about illegal street racing. The lastt one was the eighth in the series, noo less. Every one of these films is a nearclone of the last, only with marginally different stunts. Sometimes, if you listen carefully, you might find a storyline that diverges slightly from the one before.
Despite the fact that Wahlberg and Johnson are well into their 40s and Vin Diesel has hit 50, their films are all aggressively targeted at the under30s. Older cinema-goers looking for more sophisticated pictures of the kind that might once have starred Grant, Stewart or Bogart are treated with evident contempt by modern Hollywood, with the major studios largely unwilling to see beyond expensive action blockbusters and superhero spectaculars based on comic books.
Increasingly, only a handful of independent film-makers really serve the interests of older audiences. But, constrained by limited budgets, they don’t exactly churn them out.
AND very few directors have the clout or the courage to challenge the unwritten conventions of modern commercial cinema, which demand at least half-a-dozen extravagant car chases, deadly shoot- outs and fatal explosions.
So we must cherish those who do, such as the 56- year- old Greek-American Alexander Payne, whose charming, poignant, funny 2013 film Nebraska told the story of a senile old man making a road-trip with his middle-aged son.
Payne already had form in making terrific films about older people. His 2002 picture About Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson as a retired widower, was a melancholy near-masterpiece.
Another of his movies, Sideways, was a deliciously downbeat comedy about two unfulfilled middle-aged men on a week-long road trip through California’s wine country. But with Nebraska he really broke the rules, even shooting in black and white.
He was rewarded for his daring with six Academy Award nominations. yet even he appears to have been whipped back into shape by the industry.
His new film, Downsizing, which had its premiere this week at the Venice Film Festival, is a much surer commercial proposition than any of his previous films — a sci-fi comedy starring major box- office attractions in Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig.
Of course, the charge of a lack of imagination applies to audiences, too. If millions didn’t flock to see the latest Transformers or Fast And Furious film, or the new superhero blockbuster from the grandiosely named Marvel Cinematic Universe, then eventually they would stop being made. On the other hand, we can only watch what the multiplexes show us, trapping us all — studios, distributors and audiences alike — in a vicious circle of whizz- bang stunts and howitzer special effects.
As for the actor who is currently profiting most from this dispiriting situation, he is a former cocaine addict with a rap sheet as long, if not quite as muscular, as his arm.
As a teenager in his home town of Boston, Massachusetts, Wahlberg was convicted of racially motivated assault after beating a Vietnamese man unconscious with a wooden stick and, in a separate incident on the same day, punching a second Vietnamese man in the eye, referring to them both as ‘ slanteyed gooks’.
For this, he was sentenced to two
years in a juvenile detention centre, but served only 45 days. At the age of 21, he fractured a neighbour’s jaw in an unprovoked attack.
A civil action was also brought against him for throwing rocks at African-American children, while screaming racial abuse.
Wahlberg has often declared his regret for past crimes and misdemeanours, and in 2014 applied for a formal pardon from the state of Massachusetts.
however, one of his black victims opposed it, insisting that ‘a racist will always be a racist’. last year, the application was closed without being granted. Whether or not Wahlberg is genuinely repentant, he has certainly come a long way from the mean streets of Boston. It is quite an accolade to have become hollywood’s highest-paid actor.
YeTa close examination of the films that have propelled him to the pinnacle of his profession — if pinnacles are to be measured by pay cheques — reveals a curious anomaly. In box-office terms, he has actually had a pretty rotten 12 months. his latest Transformers movie, Transformers: The last Knight, cost well over £155 million to make but is the worst-performing of the five-film franchise.
Deepwater horizon, about the disastrous 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with Wahlberg playing the heroic chief engineer on the ill-fated BP oil rig, barely managed to clear its lavish production costs.
Patriots Day, in which he starred as a similarly heroic police office on the day of the Boston Marathon bombing, was a flop. Wahlberg’s extraordinarily bountiful pay packet can be easily explained — he got his money up front, so it didn’t matter how his films performed.
But all the same, it seems reasonable to conclude that the cinema, 125 years after it was invented, has plumbed a new low. not only is the world’s highestpaid movie star a proven racist and jailbird, but his most recent projects haven’t even been all that successful.
Ironically, it is the title of a lovely 1943 Cary Grant film that best sums up Mark Wahlberg. he is, indubitably, hollywood’s Mr lucky.