Mark Wahlberg is a chance-taker; one of his biggest is ‘The Gambler’

In 2003, Mark Wahlberg walked into the Santa Monica offices of HBO‎ with an idea for a series. The erstwhile leader of the Funky Bunch already had acclaimed turns in admired movies — “Boogie Nights,” “The Basketball Diaries,” “Three Kings” — but hadn’t broken through as a leading man.

Yet that day, Wahlberg and his longtime manager — a tough-minded negotiator with an anxious streak named Stephen Levinson, whom everyone calls Lev — had an idea that went beyond acting. They wanted to produce a show based on Wahlberg’s life. The actor wouldn’t star in it — that would tax the meta-o-meter, and maybe his schedule, a little too much. But the beats of the characters would echo those of Wahlberg himself — a streetwise actor from the East Coast and his friends chumming around Los Angeles, trying to go Hollywood and remain who they are at the same time.‎

The executives liked the idea. But they were also cautious, in part because of one of the men who’d be driving it creatively.

“I think a lot of people, myself included, underestimated Mark as a producer,” said Michael Lombardo, the current programming chief of HBO, who was at the meeting. “It was hard for some people to see past the underwear model and white rapper.”

Despite the reservations, HBO bit. The show, under the hand of creator Doug Ellin, became not only a massive hit — with eight seasons, “Entourage” is one of the longest-running scripted series in HBO history and is one of only two modern shows on the network to spawn a film — but the start of an improbable career.

By now, most people have gotten past the idea of the 43-year-old Wahlberg as someone who’s simply managed to carve out a solid acting niche. Wahlberg is, after all, the reigning actor in one of the few franchises to gross more than $3 billion worldwide (“Transformers”), the star of the most successful R-rated comedy in history (“Ted”) and someone who has achieved the rare feat of having at least one $100-million grossing movie in three straight years (“Ted,” “Lone Survivor” and “Transformers: Age of Extinction”).

What he hasn’t been thought of, at least among the wider public, is a Hollywood kingmaker. In an era when actors, even the best-known ones, have a hard time getting projects made, Wahlberg and Levinson are responsible for surprisingly large chunks of the zeitgeist — on television, such shows as “Boardwalk Empire,” “In Treatment” and “Entourage”; in film, with movies like “The Fighter,” “Lone Survivor” and an upcoming dramatization of the Cocaine Cowboys story called “American Desperado.”

And what Wahlberg really hasn’t been thought of is a serious dramatic actor. His four best-regarded movies — “The Fighter,” “The Departed,” “Three Kings” and “Boogie Nights” —- are all regarded primarily for things other than his performance, even though “Departed” did land him a supporting actor Oscar nomination and “Boogie Nights” a lifetime of Dirk Diggler admiration and jokes.

Wahlberg aims to change that perception with “The Gambler,” a drama that will make its world premiere at AFI Fest on Monday as part of a larger Wahlberg career tribute before opening in theaters Dec. 19. The “Gambler’s” pedigree is unimpeachable: a remake of James Toback’s hard-bitten ‘70s classic, a new script by Oscar winner William Monahan, a co-star in the comer Brie Larson and a director, in Rupert Wyatt, who after making the acclaimed “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” walked away from that franchise and chose to make this film (or, more accurately, was chosen by Wahlberg and Levinson, the lead producers on the Paramount production).

But it’s Wahlberg’s screen presence that stands out most. As Jim Bennett, a compulsive blackjack player who also happens to be an English professor, Wahlberg plays someone he’s never played before: a dark, literate character with a streak of masochistic honesty.

“The Gambler” shows Wahlberg far from the kind of stoic masculinity he has evinced, to great cultural effect, in most of his movies. Instead, he moves with a hollowed-out, broken-down desperation. He has pages-long monologues that contain poetic turns of phrase (“Genius isn’t magical; it’s material”) and is in nearly every scene of what is, despite its packaging, not a casino thriller but an existential character study.

Even his troublemaking wisecracks come via a man who’s genuinely in dire straits, not the can-do savior of Michael Bay artifacts like “Pain and Gain.”

‎”What Mark and I talked about is you don’t have to like Jim,” Wyatt said. “You just have to be interested in Jim, which is an interesting challenge.”

As with “Entourage,” Mark Wahlberg once again hopes people underestimate him.

‎A family man

It is Saturday afternoon, and Wahlberg has just finished lunch at the Bar Marmont, enjoying a rare day off from shooting, in this case “Ted 2.” Wahlberg’s life is a mix of “Entourage” and the prosaic. He has a penchant for flying private--it takes a second, upon hearing him say he gave someone “a lift,” to realize he’s talking about a plane--but when he drops a name it is as likely to be his pediatrician as a pop star.

Wahlberg, who these days attends church daily and says he keeps a prayer book with him on sets, has four children with wife Rhea Durham. When lunch is over he will hop in his sports coupe and peel off down Sunset, but it’s to hurry home to supervise a Halloween party for 15 kids.

The subject of a difficult director comes up, and Wahlberg sounds a skeptical note. “I think when you don’t have any success or expect any success, you protect it a lot more closely when you do have it,” a clear reference to himself. “You’re willing to go into the trenches a little more.”

He spent six months doing just that on “The Gambler.” Wahlberg would recite monologues in front of a mirror, at home and on the set of “Lone Survivor,” trying out different rhythms, like a rap song — a point he demonstrates by freestyling several pages, unsolicited. “When you think of someone to give these monologues,” Wyatt says, “you might not think of Mark right away, but his background as a rapper helped a lot with the musicality of the script. It was quite amazing to watch, really.”

Wahlberg also looked at old David Foster Wallace interviews with Charlie Rose and sat in, with Wyatt, on numerous college English classes, from the University of Michigan to UCLA to get a feel for the academic life. “What struck me was how not engaged the students were,” said Wahlberg, who never went to college. “The professor is talking and they’re all on their iPads, playing a game or shopping.”

Wahlberg described how he was on a liquid diet for months to attain the lost-man gauntness of Jim. There is a focus on body type for Wahlberg, a function, perhaps, of his underwear-model past.

The decision to make “The Gambler,” Wahlberg said, came about because it seemed the right moment, four years after “Fighter,” to get into something grittier. Most actors will say that they just react to scripts as they go and don’t have a larger plan, but Wahlberg and Levinson (now also his producing partner) have a strategy that’s either grandiose or smart — “it’s all very simple yet very well thought out,” Wahlberg puts it — involving a kind of deliberate jumbling of the pattern.

“We like to look at two or three films at a time,” Levinson said. “That’s the best way to make sure there’s a balance.” The overarching principle is that different genres such as dramas, comedies and action are well spaced-out. He, Wahlberg and agent Ari Emanuel, the third leg in the long-standing entity of Wahlberg Inc., have designed his career with the explicit idea that an actor will be more bankable if he’s perceived as more versatile.

The team, for instance, had pause about “Daddy’s Home,” the new comedy Wahlberg will do with Will Ferrell, since it would come so closely on the heels of “Ted 2,” but decided it was different enough--a family-oriented two-hander with Ferrell in which he plays the loose canon--that it was okay. “Deepwater Horizon,” the BP Oil spill drama Wahlberg aims to make next year with J.C. Chandor, would have been a no-go on similarity grounds to “The Perfect Storm,” but Levinson said that “then we thought that it was so many years later that wouldn’t be a concern.” If people look back at Wahlberg’s career and are struck foremost by how many different things he’s done, it would be, for Wahlberg Inc., the strongest sign that they’ve succeeded.

The strategic thinking began to coalesce in the early 2000s, a little before “Entourage.” After movies like “Planet of The Apes” with Tim Burton and “The Truth About Charlie” with Jonathan Demme proved disappointing, Wahlberg and Levinson shifted from the conventional method of allowing a director to be the determining factor in choosing projects. “I had to think that if it’s my name above the title these movies really have to be successful if I’m going to have any kind of long-term career,” he said he began thinking after those movies disappointed. “I couldn’t just do a movie because I wanted to work with the filmmaker.”

Wahlberg is apt to use the phrase “I want to do it all” in interviews, and with a kind of edgy defiance, a street belief that you take on an opponent even if there’s good reason to believe he might whup you. This might result in a slightly lower batting average, but it also means--the Golden Rule again--a decided diversity-.

Casting director Sheila Jaffe, who has been in Wahlberg’s inner circle since shortly after “Boogie Nights” and cast nearly all the movies he’s produced, says that kind of indomitability, even against good sense, has been key.

“It was one of those things where if one of his movies didn’t do that well, he just got up again and did another one,” she said. “There’s a steadiness to it. A lot of actors don’t have that. They get in their head about it and then get nervous and cautious and things start to come apart.”

“Lone Survivor” director Peter Berg thinks Wahlberg “plays like Derek Jeter — like he’s three runs behind at all times,” an assessment the Boston-raised sports fan Wahlberg would appreciate, perhaps minus the particular analogy.

The decision to produce, Wahlberg said, was born of another, more frustrating concern. “I remember sitting there on these films when I was just an actor and you just see something melting down or the wheels coming off, and it’s like what the …,” he said. “Sometimes I would think about saying something, but I would just go to my trailer and lay down and watch ESPN.”

Closest to the Hole, as the Wahlberg company is called (Levinson has a separate firm called Leverage, though the two men almost always work together), has become a textbook example for the actor-as-producer model. As the producing clout expanded, so did the acting offers; as the actor’s performance range widened, Wahlberg and Levinson gained access to better material. Personally, the two form a kind of yin and yang--the inside-the-Beltway development man and the globetrotting public face of the enterprise--though Wahlberg is also known for dropping in on table reads and other such creative nitty-grittiness, a tendency that can surprise the filmmaker and writer types present.

It shouldn’t go unremarked upon that Wahlberg’s rise has also coincided, and enjoyed a symbiosis with, the emergence of Emanuel, another one-time upstart who rose to the top of the heap with a similar confidence and swagger. The Ari Gold and Vinny Chase “Entourage” comparisons are not idle ones.

Levinson, meanwhile, has his own “Entourage” analogue. The producer, whom Wahlberg met in the 1990s when Levinson was an assistant on the desk of a previous agent, partly inspired Kevin Connolly’s character, E, on the series. He functions similarly in the Wahlberg orbit — as the voice of reason with a small chip on his shoulder.

Meetings with the pair can often result in a tough-talking Levinson going quiet or flatly stating what Team Wahlberg wants. (“Lev and I have a good cop-bad cop thing in the room sometimes,” Wahlberg said laughing.) A producer who worked with them said this had a notable effect: “They’re good producers because, honestly, I think executives are a little scared of them.”

Overcoming criticism

Over the years some skeptics have questioned Wahlberg’s decidedly nonclassical training; he has no formal acting education and only earned his GED last year. He also still lets flashes of his street past out, as when describing, with some enthusiasm, how he had to subdue Berg physically several times when the director came at him unexpectedly during the making of “Lone Survivor.”

But spend time with Wahlberg and an intelligence becomes apparent, as does a refreshing, often astute directness. In a conversation last year for his surprise hit “2 Guns,” he was asked by The Times what he thought of a string of expensive Hollywood bombs, particularly “The Lone Ranger.” He replied: “They’re spending $250 million for two dudes on a horse? Where’s the money going?” The comment quickly went viral and made Wahlberg a truth-telling hero of sorts in Hollywood.

His acting has also come under fire. To some, it’s too heavy-lidded, too lacking in dynamism. Many actors implicitly raise the philosophical question of whether it could just as easily have been someone else in their well-known roles if it had not been them, but with his lo-fi presence, Wahlberg seems to suggest it more directly.

Those who’ve worked with Wahlberg, though, say audiences shouldn’t be fooled by a lack of histrionics. In an email, “Departed” director Martin Scorsese lauded it as a kind of potent minimalism. “You can feel his intensity in every single shot in which he appears,” he wrote. “The way he moves, the way he communicates so much without a single word, is absolutely remarkable.”

Still, Wahlberg can sometimes seem less an actor than a symbol. To some, he’s a sign that extraordinary fame and runaway talent do not always go hand in hand. But it’s also reasonable to view him as an encouraging sign of Hollywood democracy — a sign that, perhaps more than in most realms of American public life, hard work and ambition can win out over bloodline or background (provided, of course, you look a certain way).

Wahlberg and Levinson have a similar take, still seeing themselves as outsiders. “We appreciate every day that we’re allowed to stay in this town, that nobody’s sent us home,” Levinson said with a laugh.

Added Wahlberg, “Yes, there’s a long-term plan I think about all the time. But if something doesn’t work, that’s OK too; we’ll just move on to the next. You have to understand where I come from. I grew up digging ditches.”

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com