Actors who think their jobs are tough should not expect empathy from Mark Wahlberg. The star of "Lone Survivor" went on a rant recently in which he lambasted his fellow thespians for complaining that their jobs are so tough.
"For actors to sit there and talk about, ‘Oh, I went to SEAL training,’ and 'I slept on the ...' — I don’t give a f--- what you did," said Wahlberg at a Q&A following the premiere of his movie Tuesday. "You don’t do what these guys did. For somebody to sit there and say my job was as difficult as somebody in the military’s. How f------ dare you. While you sit in a makeup chair for two hours."
"Lone Survivor" is based on a real Navy SEAL's experiences in Afghanistan, and Wahlberg underwent extensive training to prepare for his role.
Wahlberg added, "I don’t give a s--- if you get your a-- busted. You get to go home at the end of the day. You get to go to your hotel room. You get to order f------ chicken. Or your steak. Whatever the f--- it is."
Though he did not name any actors he felt were specifically guilty of this kind of hubris, Wahlberg's comments come on the back of leaked court documents from last week, in which Tom Cruise appeared to equate working as an actor and missing out on his daughter Suri's life to fighting in a war.
In the documents, which were reported on by sites including TMZ and the Guardian, Cruise was asked by a lawyer if he was aware that his own counsel had "equated your absence from Suri ... to someone fighting in Afghanistan."
Said Cruise, "I didn't hear the Afghanistan, but that's what it feels like, and certainly on this last movie it was brutal."
In a statement, Cruise's lawyer Bert Fields said, "The assertions that Tom Cruise likened making a movie to being at war in Afghanistan is a gross distortion of the record.... What Tom said, laughingly, was that sometimes, 'That's what it feels like.'"
Later, at the end of the session, Wahlberg apologized for "losing my s---" and said he was "proud to be a part" of the movie.
"Lone Survivor" opens in limited release on Dec. 27, and goes wide Jan. 10, 2014.