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Mark Wahlberg wanted to meet his daughter's boyfriend — and the kid came prepared

You gotta give the young man points for chutzpah!
/ Source: TODAY

Dating Mark Wahlberg's 13-year-old daughter Ella comes with a catch: You have to pass muster with dad first.

And when dad is an A-list actor with serious action credits on his resume, you gotta come prepared.

Fortunately, as Wahlberg related on "The Graham Norton Show" recently, that's exactly what one of Ella's prospective beaus did!

Wahlberg explained to Norton that, after Ella said she was dating someone new, he told her, "I want to meet this kid.'"

"'I want to meet him, and then you can hang out with him in a safe environment,' and she was like, ‘What's a safe environment, dad?'" he continued.

He noted that with a 13-year-old, "everything is the attitude."

So the prospective boyfriend comes over to the house. "And he one-ups me," said Wahlberg. "He brings his mom!"

Game, set, match.

Ella has definitely got her dad's sass — last September you may remember she appeared with Wahlberg on a radio show and challenged him to rap. And he did, causing lifetimes of embarrassment!

Wahlberg has three other children: Michael, 11, Brendan, 9 and Grace, 7 with his wife Rhea Durham, whom he wed in 2009.

Back to the boyfriend vetting: Wahlberg noted pretty quickly that the young man was pretty savvy in the ways of parents.

"The genius thing is he was so sweet and [my daughter] is like steamrolling me all the time and he's seeing it, like she's being rude to me and she's being mean to me and [he's] like, 'If you're not nice to [your dad], he may not want to be around you,'" he recalled.

As it turned out, the young man was "a keeper" and "really nice," he said. "I'm like, OK, the perfect scenario is to find one boy that she's with forever ... but I don't know if she can hold him down," he laughed.

Hey, that is the risk, dads: That your daughters might be able to play your dad games better than you expect!

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