HE OWNS THE NIGHT

Analysing THE SHEER INSANITY of a day in the life of Mark Wahlberg

Ali Gray

13th September 2018

Mark Wahlberg is most unlike you or I. For starters, he's a rich and famous celebrity, who is so rich and famous and blessed with over-confidence he can get away with inventing hypothetical scenarios whereby he averts the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and face almost no backlash. His career trajectory is uniquely insane, running the full gamut from teenage thug to white rapper to underpants model to Hollywood actor to hamburger magnate. And despite his obvious handicap of looking permanently like he's not sure what floor his lift just stopped at, Wahlberg is inexplicably popular, not just with people who go and see movies with titles like 'Max Payne' and '2 Guns', but with actual, credible filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese and James Gray. He's one of a select circle of actors - including Adam Sandler and Nicolas Cage - who can lurch from atrocious dreck to proper cinematic fare without even changing his facial expression.

When you or I wish our colleagues and co-workers a good weekend, we do it on the way out the door. When Mark Wahlberg does it, he hires a professional photographer, a warehouse, lighting equipment and a Harley Davidson.


He is a remarkable person. Shit, maybe he could have stopped 9/11, I don't know.

Wahlberg hit the news again this week when he shared his daily routine on an Instagram Story. Celebs sharing daily routines always raise a red flag; they're usually an excuse to show you how healthy and disciplined they are, like Myleene Klass proving how much better she is than you by eating quasi-fictional foods with made-up prefixes that you've literally never even heard of, like activated almonds and cultured vegetables - even her vegetables are more cultured than you.

But Wahlberg's routine? Take a look.


Fucking hell. It's inhuman. Indecipherable. It is the daily routine of the Zodiac killer, minus all the murdering. I have read it several times and am so far unable to process it at all. Part of me still thinks that the times are all wrong and it's been a big misunderstanding based on a Microsoft Outlook timezone snafu and actually Mark Wahlberg keeps normal hours and had to fire the intern who posted the story to keep his rep in check. Maybe it's all a front for his late night vigilantism. But it appears not. Mark Wahlberg is essentially nocturnal. Let's break it down, section by section.

2.30am - wake up

Right away, you realise you're not dealing with a normal functioning human being; these are the haunting hours of a depressed ghost. Mark Wahlberg wakes up at 2.30am. At night. That is unconscionable. It must be a lie. It has to be. I cannot fathom this. Waking up at 2.30am is like slapping nature in the face, an affront to God. You might consider it a reasonable time to get in after a drink and a dance and a kebab, but Mark Wahlberg is already raring to go. He'd probably die if he ever had a proper kebab, and he'd probably try and eat it for brunch like a weirdo. Try to imagine how long it'd take you to properly wake up if you could even bring yourself to set an alarm for that early, and could physically manage to remove yourself from bed. Your body would be screaming silently for sunlight. Living like this permanently would make your body curl up into a husk, like stale bread. You'd become a monster of urban myth. Every day would be like the first day of holiday where you need to get a cab to the airport for a cheap 5am Ryanair flight. Waking up this early should be illegal and Mark Wahlberg should be arrested.
2.45am - prayer time

It's cool, Mark Wahlberg is super into praying: righteous. I would never mock anyone for following religion or having a rigid belief system or any faith in a higher power, or any code to live by (except this daily routine). Still: 30 minutes of prayer time seems a bit steep, doesn't it? Once you've done all the prayers and that, the Bible bits, the God stuff, how much time does that leave? Does he ever keep one eye on the clock? Maybe some days sleep in for an extra 10 minutes, back out a poo then make it a tight 15 with the big guy? Flexi-prayer time: trim a few hymns during the week but have a big psalm sesh on the weekend. It's not like anyone’s going to admonish him for irregular timekeeping, every sane person is fucking asleep. If there is a God, I'm pretty sure all you're getting at 2.45am is his out-of-office. Even omnipotent superbeings composed of pure light need to have some boundaries.
3.15am - breakfast

What is the most depressing thing you can think of? The single saddest human experience it is possible to endure? Unless you are picturing Mark Wahlberg joylessly eating a plain yoghurt in front of an open fridge at 3.15 in the morning, you are incorrect. How does breakfast even work that early? How can you ever truly train your body to tolerate granola at that time of day? Is breakfast still the most important meal of the day if it's technically closer to a midnight snack than it is the morning? Why, Mark Wahlberg? Why? I already hate this. I understand you now less than I ever have. Your daily routine is my idea of personal hell and you haven't even gone to the gym yet.
3.40am-5.15am - workout

Just the 1 hour and 35 minutes of exercise before sunrise, no biggie, 100% not insane at all. While the rest of us are hypnotised in a deep, bottomless sleep, punctuated by the occasional fart, Mark Wahlberg has already burned more calories than you will consume all day. Mark Wahlberg has lifted your entire body weight 20 times over before you've even got your morning semi. I understand that this is part of the movie star lifestyle that Wahlberg has chosen - a particularly gruelling one, given his chosen persona is that of 'permanently confused tough guy' - but I also think working out this much this early is just a power move so he can pass the jocks on the way out of the gym and make them feel bad for not being as rad as he is. "5 o'clock staht? You guys are slacking!" he'll say, hyper awake but dying inside.
5.30am - post-workout meal

What the fuck do you even call this meal? It's not breakfast because you've already eaten. It's not brunch because normal-timeline-wise it falls on the wrong side of breakfast. Mark Wahlberg can't call it second breakfast because then he sounds like a hobbit (although I will concede the thought of Mark Wahlberg playing a Tolkien hobbit that hails from Boston is, indeed, hilarious). This is his second meal of the day, probably a blanched white chicken breast eaten whole like one of the aliens from V eating a rat; he's the Vincent D'Onofrio alien from Men in Black, consuming proteins and drinking sugar water in an attempt to pass as human. Oh, look at me, I'm Mark Wahlberg, I've eaten two of my daily meals before you've even put your slippers on, oooh I'm putting kale into a smoothie, get a load of me, also I was nominated for an Oscar, urrr. Your last Oscar nomination was in 2011 man, get over yourself.
6.00am - shower

Curious. This can only be described as a very long shower. 90 minutes is super excessive and wasteful, even if you're Mark Wahlberg and your shower is powered by AQUAhydrate smart water with electrolytes. There are three possible explanations for a shower of this length: 1) Mark Wahlberg is an obsessive compulsive germophobe and needs an hour and a half to scrub himself clean of any and all impurities he might have contracted from his empty gym; 2) Although Mark Wahlberg's daily schedule gives the impression that it is rigid and efficient and organised with military precision, it is, in reality, extremely changeable given the irregular patterns than actors work in, and is therefore hard to account for in totality, making the very format of a 'daily schedule' questionable in the first place; 3) HE'S HAVING A MASSIVE WANK.
7.30am - golf

Sure. You spend 90 minutes in the shower, leaving you with 30 minutes to play golf. Another ordinary day! Unless you're sinking 18 hole-in-ones and bombing around the world's smallest golf course via the world's fastest car, there's no way you're squeezing in a round of golf in half an hour, Wahlberg, you fucking fraud. I put it to you that you are in fact playing on your own crazy golf course-slash-pitch and putt that you had built in your back garden to give you something to do while the rest of your family slept normal hours. If you want a fun image, imagine a bulging, shirtless Mark Wahlberg squeezing himself into a tiny golf cart to travel three feet to the next hole, then getting increasingly angry that he can't do the windmill without cheating. The rest of the world wakes up and Mark Wahlberg has already felt every big boy emotion under the sun.
8.00am - snack

Now this, this sounds like a meal. An hour and a half designated to a mere 'snack'. I'm going to need more details than this. It's not 'snack / TV time' or 'snack / work calls'. He's not snacking while doing other activities. The snack is singular. He's doing nothing between these hours other than focusing on one snack. Maybe he's eating every Cheeto from a family-sized pack of Cheetos slowly and deliberately. Maybe he's eating a Tuc biscuit while staring at a wall. Maybe he's eating an apple, contemplating The Happening. Maybe he's sorting all of his M&Ms into their colour groups before giving them individual personalities then pitting them against each other in a sort of confectionery colour war, where the losers get eaten by Mark Wahlberg. It's just guesswork, I admit, but I haven't got a lot to go on.
9.20am - trawl the news for a real-life tragedy that resulted in the loss of American life and get on the phone to Peter Berg to talk about making a movie out of it

Not on the schedule, but I'm reading between the lines.
9.30am - cryo chamber recovery

Woah. WOAH. Just dropped that in there, Mark. Nestled between 'snack' and 'snack': your bog standard, run-of-the-mill cryo chamber recovery, like it's the most natural thing in the world. 60 minutes of it, because his day is basically half over already. Normal. So normal. Regardless, questions: 1. What is a cryo chamber? 2. Are the other members of your family allowed cryo chamber recovery or is it just for Daddy? 3. Seriously, is this just code for another massive wank? This is the state of fame in 2018: a world-famous movie star casually and voluntarily confesses via his own personal social media channel that he spends sixty minutes each day recovering in something called a cryo chamber and nobody bats an eyelid. It's like the 18th weirdest thing that even happened today. Guys: we crucified, almost literally crucified Michael Jackson for sleeping in a hyperbaric oxygen tent in the 80s, and that wasn't even true. Surely the least we could do is make a more conscious effort to mock Mark Wahlberg. We've got to be better than this.
10.30am - snack

Another snack? Wahlberg you greedy son of a bitch. Incidentally, if I had Mark Wahlberg's life - his money, his fame, his opportunities - this is probably about the time I'd wake up. I wouldn't get dressed until midday and you'll be lucky if I have trousers on at lunch. Fuck you, I'm Mark Wahlberg now, I can wear what I want.
11.00am - family time/meetings/work calls

The best kind of family time: the kind that's combined with work. Mark Wahlberg is a modern man, so he can be a dad and an actor at the same time, combining the simultaneous responsibilities of making a million dollar phone call to a bigshot Hollywood producer while pretending to be impressed by a jigsaw. Mark Wahlberg can wrestle with his kids while also wrestling with the morality of playing a soldier who kills indiscriminately for the US government. Mark Wahlberg can read his daughter a story while reading Michael Bay's latest script: often they're one and the same, he just leaves out all the stage directions about chicks bending over cars. In a way, being a father is the hardest role Mark Wahlberg has ever had to play, so, y'know, par for the course. The crazy golf course.
1.00pm - lunch

If you have already been awake for 11 hours, this legally cannot be called lunch. Technically, factually, it is his dinner, as determined by a court of law. What does Mark Wahlberg eat for lunch? What bizarre prefixes do his vegetables have? Maybe I've got him all wrong. Maybe 1pm is the time he cherishes the most, the time where he heads down to Wahlburgers, the burger joint that proudly bears his name, run by members of his own family, using old family recipes, but he gets his food to go, because Donnie is probably there looking for attention, being loud and overly aggressive towards the waiting staff as usual, and honestly, the smell of fat in the air makes his pores close, and there's too many ordinary non-Wahlbergs there eating junk food, who probably don't even go to the gym until like 7am, so he sits and eats his Wahlburger in his car with a baseball cap on so nobody sees him but can't finish it.
2.00pm - meetings/work calls

Finally, he's getting his head down for a proper hour of meetings and work calls: no kids to distract him this time. What is a meeting like with Mark Wahlberg? I can guarantee the following truths: i) When Mark Wahlberg sends out a meeting invite, he puts 'meeting' in the subject line and nothing at all in the body of the invite; ii) When Mark Wahlberg attends a meeting, he walks into a room talking on the phone and puts his finger in the air to indicate he'll be finished soon, as if somehow everyone else just interrupted him; iii) When Mark Wahlberg finally sits down at the meeting he himself arranged, he'll say 'What's this one about again?' and a room full of people will have to breathe through their nostrils in order to stifle screams of anger.
3.00pm - pick kids up @ school

He's flagging now, surely, his waking day already drawing to a close. Given the ridiculous hour he woke up, this is essentially the equivalent of picking his kids up from school at night. I wonder how his kids feel about him keeping the hours of a reverse Batman? It must be confusing enough to be the son or daughter of a famous Hollywood movie star, with all of the baggage that comes with that status, but that's before you factor in that Mark Wahlberg has the same sleep pattern as a hedgehog. Do you think Mark Wahlberg has trouble comprehending how time works for other people? Like, he just stares at people ordering a coffee at 3.30pm, unable to square it off? Additional question: does Mark Wahlberg definitely know how to tell time? I reckon he's been famous enough for long enough for it to not matter that he can't tell time, because he's had people making decisions for him for decades. That would certainly explain this hellish timeline: he just doesn't know what the big hands and little hands mean.
4.00pm - workout #2

Urrrghhhh. Fuck off fuck off fuck off. Everyone knows you go to the gym so you can eat like shit all day without feeling guilty; if you go to the gym afterwards as well, you're throwing out the natural order of things. The best bit of going to the gym is counting down the minutes until you don't have to be in the gym any more; going twice in one day makes him one videotape rental away from being Patrick Bateman. What workout is he doing now, in his afternoon/evening gym session, that he couldn't have already done in his pre-morning workout? How essential is the second round of daily ab-crunches to ensure Mark Wahlberg's lasting and fulfilling career? Does anyone really need to go to the gym at all, ever? Finally, we get to the real issue.
5.00pm - shower

Second shower of the day, a tight 30 minutes this time, no funny business, he's basically in and out. I reckon he block books this half hour just in case he needs to carve out a little me time, a pocket of just a few minutes for him to sit, naked and chattering, on the beige tiled floor of his wet room, his sobs muffled by the sound of the shower, his physical form hurting all the time, his brain frazzled by the constant war it engages in with his circadian bodyclock, the night closing in. Basically in and out.
5.30pm - dinner/family time

Finally: Mark Wahlberg and I have something in common! If I'm at home, then I'll often eat with the kids at around 5.30pm, and now it turns out I'm just like a Hollywood movie star! If it wasn't for the fact that Mark Wahlberg is eating his last meal of the day at the equivalent of his midnight, it'd almost make him seem normal and/or relatable. What percentage of Mark Wahlberg's evening meals could be described as 'steak', do you think? I'm going to say 100% of Mark Wahlberg's evening meals. Chowing down on a fatty-boom-boom T-Bone every night while his kids eat their vegetables because he's been to the gym twice today so he's earned it. Inside Mark Wahlberg's body, his organs groan silently to one another. It'll all be over soon.

7.30pm - bedtime

Mark Wahlberg goes to bed before his kids. He goes to bed before the watershed. During the summer months, he goes to bed before the sun has even gone down. I can only assume Mark Wahlberg is going method to play an idiotic muscle-clad insomniac. What's hilarious is that he's asleep between the hours of 7.30pm and 2.30am; if you had to rank each of the day’s 24 hours, those seven hours would probably be in your top ten, along with lunch. Nothing fun has ever happened outside of those hours in the recorded history of fun. It's all just joggers nodding at each other at ungodly hours and people forcing their body clocks to tolerate shots of seaweed in the morning. The man who played a character called 'Bob Lee Swagger' in a movie called 'Shooter' is in his pyjamas before CBBC have even begun broadcasting Blue Peter.

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