Mark Wahlberg says “it all worked out in the end” with Martin Scorsese and The Departed, but he was “a little pissed”

Mark Wahlberg, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Matt Damon

Photo: Shawn Ehlers/WireImage for BWR Public Relations (Getty Images)

Can you imagine being Oscar-nominated for a film directed by the most esteemed director of his generation and complaining about the experience? That’s Mark Wahlberg on Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, a set Wahlberg hasn’t stopped shit-talking since 2007.

In fairness, 17 years later, he softens his complaints by saying, “I was a little pissed about a couple things but look, it all worked out in the end, I think.” But that didn’t stop him from bringing up, once again, the fight over his hair extensions.

“Originally I was supposed to play another part. Originally, I was supposed to get paid,” Wahlberg recalls on a new episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And then even when we kind of agreed that I would play Dignam and I saw the advantages of playing that part and how I would approach the situation with everybody else playing opposite me, I then had another movie after.”

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Wahlberg was going into Invincible, so his “weird hair” in the movie was because he “was just trying to grow my hair for the next film.” Generously, he says he “completely [understands] where Marty was coming from’ dealing with his star-studded cast (Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin, Jack Nicholson, and more) as well as the studio.

Wahlberg “was supposed to be in and out in five weeks,” but shooting ended up taking longer, “And so I went off to go and shoot Invincible, got my hair extensions, came back and then they were like, oh you gotta take out the extensions. I was like, [this] shit took eight hours. I’m not gonna take this out. We had a couple of issues.”

Wahlberg now acknowledges that Dignam was “a good role” and “an opportunity for me to really kind of go off and have some fun.” But the action star has been talking about how disgruntled The Departed made him for years. In 2018, he told GQ he rejected Scorsese’s offer multiple times because “I wanted a different part, and I wanted some other different things.”

He was flown to Scorsese’s office where “I read the script again, and I was pretty angry and I said again I wasn’t going to do it. Marty told me, ‘Look at this part, look at what you get to do with all these people.’ He knows I’m from that [Boston] world and I talked to him about improvising and doing my own thing and he said, ‘Dude, you’re free to do what you want to do.’”

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But even after getting Wahlberg to agree, the pair continued to butt heads through filming, as evidenced by the infamous hair extension story. The actor first told it in 2007 to The Telegraph, sharing that “I wouldn’t cut my hair and Marty was pissed off. He was like, ‘You’ve got to cut your fucking hair,’ and I was, ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ He was, ‘I’m Martin Scorsese… da-dee da.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not getting paid for this… da-dee-da. What the fuck?’ He was pushing me in different ways.”

In fact, “Marty and I were constantly in this struggle,” Wahlberg said in that 2007 interview, adding another anecdote where he questioned why they weren’t moving ahead to shoot a scene and was told Scorsese wasn’t “creatively there yet.” Wahlberg “had problems with Marty,” he admitted, “But it wasn’t just Marty. The whole time I was in the character so I was mad at everybody. It was Leo [DiCaprio], Matt [Damon] and Jack [Nicholson]. Fuck Jack, too.”

Wahlberg told The Telegraph back then that he and Scorsese were able to laugh about it now and even hoped to work together in the future… which obviously hasn’t panned out. Wahlberg even participated in a failed pitch for a Departed sequel with the hope of casting Brad Pitt and Robert De Niro. But getting Oscar nominations is “not as high on the priority list as it used to be, let’s just say that,” he now says on Happy Sad Confused. (That much is probably clear to anyone looking at his IMDb page.)