Mark Wahlberg is bonding with his 18-year-old daughter Ella’s beau.
“I used to work out to keep the boys away from my girls, and now I’m working out with the boyfriend,” Wahlberg joked in an Instagram video Friday.
In the clip, the “Joe Bell” actor and Ella’s suitor are shown palling around in a gym while wearing matching orange T-shirts.
“Ella is a lucky girl and I’m a lucky dad,” Wahlberg captioned his post. “He is a great young man.”
“Heyyy keep em close. Smart,” Mario Lopez teased in the comments.
Mom Rhea Wahlberg also approves of her daughter's suitor. In July, the former model, 43, shared a picture of Ella and her boyfriend with their arms around each other. She captioned the sweet shot, “These two,” and added heart emojis.
Wahlberg and Rhea, who began dating in 2001 and married in 2009, are also parents of Michael, 15, Brendan, 13, and Grace, 11.
Wahlberg opened up in 2020 about being shot down by Ella at a father-daughter school dance.
“I didn’t get one dance,” he recalled on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” “She said, ‘Dad, if you embarrass me, I will never talk to you again.’”
The rejection didn’t come as a total surprise. Wahlberg told People in 2018 that raising a teenage girl is “tough.”
“But people say that they pass through it and they come back to you,” he said. “She wants to be off and doing her own thing. (There’s) a lot of attitude, a lot of aggression, a lot of, ‘You’re the worst, you ruin everything!’”
But 11-year-old Grace still wants to hang out with her dad. Wahlberg has been known to share videos of Grace giving him manicures!
Related: