Leonardo Dicaprio and Mark Wahlberg didn't want to act with each other initially in 'The Basketball Diaries'
The tea is always scalding hot when there's drama among celebrities, and seemingly yet another bygone feud has suddenly come to the spotlight.
Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo Dicaprio had a falling out back in the day when the two filmed the critically-acclaimed Jim Caroll biopic, 'The Basketball Diaries'. Although Wahlberg has previously addressed this long-standing feud with the 'Titanic' star, it seems that there is more to the story than we initially thought.
They have since made amends but their "friendship" started out pretty rocky even though the two were practically on the same boat.
In the '90s, both Wahlberg and DiCaprio were young, heartthrob actors making it big in Tinseltown and were focused on establishing themselves as impeccable thespians with the few significant roles that they had played.
So we know that the two have worked together before, and quite well might we add, yet we can't imagine them squabbling even if the media believes on the contrary. However, Wahlberg has previously visited this topic.
He had revealed where he presently stands with Dicaprio and also that the two were basically at each other's throats in the '90s. Besides their 1995 stint, they were also seen together in 2006's 'The Departed'.
Despite their ups and downs, the 'Ted' actor said to Extra TV in 2018 that he is ready to work with Dicaprio again. In a 2013 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Wahlberg revealed in an unfiltered anecdote Dicaprio's exact reaction to his involvement in 'The Basketball Diaries'.
"Leonardo was like, 'Over my dead f**king body. Marky Mark's not going to be in this f**king movie,'" Wahlberg told THR. "I was a bit of a d**k to him at a charity basketball game. So he was like, 'This f**king a*****e is not going to be in this movie'."
All that changed once they began filming, and the two formed a unique friendship. At the 11th annual LEAP conference hosted at UCLA, Wahlberg said, "He didn't want me for the part, and I didn't think he was right for the part. We both had to really learn how to respect each other, and we earned it."
E! has now spilled the tea about what actually transpired between the two when they were young and up-and-coming Hollywood stars. 'The Basketball Diaries' was reportedly decades-in-the making, and Jim Carroll's hard-hitting life story was more than ready to be brought to the silver screen.
However they needed a bonafide actor to fit the role of the on-screen former teen basketball sensation.
The crime-drama was based on Caroll's memoir of the same name, and it chronicled his journey from his days playing basketball, his downward spiral into drug addiction and prostitution, and his subsequent rise to glory as a writer, poet, punk-rocker and a cultural all-American icon.
It was a pretty big deal and almost everyone from Matt Dillion to River Phoenix, all young faces of talent from the 1980s, tried to bag the role. However, the project was basically at a standstill, with frequent switches in the people involved in the project.
At the time, Dicaprio's portfolio was rather sparse, but the 20-year-old had already been nominated for an Oscar for his role in 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape', alongside Johnny Depp. His physical resemblance to Carroll and his acting talent ultimately helped him earn the part over his peer competitors.
Dicaprio, in conversation with the San Fransisco Chronicle pre-release of the film, said, "With this role, I saw a character that would take a lot of work and would require a lot of exploration into something I've never dealt with before. There were a lot of emotions that I would have to deal with, and basically, it was a cool character."
Coming to Wahlberg, who played Mickey in the film, it has been revealed that Carroll himself wasn't too keen on the 'Lone Survivor' actor playing his on-screen junkie friend, a kind of a demagogue that the writer had based off of various people he had met on the streets while growing up.
Back then, Wahlberg was best known for his underwear modeling and his rapping career with 'Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch'. But with director Scott Kalvert's encouragement, Wahlberg eventually auditioned with Carroll in the room and won him over with his prowess.
"[Kalvert] only said this to three people—Tupac, Will Smith and myself," Wahlberg told Huffington Post in 2014. "He said, 'You guys should be actors and you will be actors.' He called me in for the film. Leonardo said, 'No way, I'm not making a movie with Marky Mark.' As did a lot of other people."
"We had a weird run-in at an MTV Rock and Jock basketball game," he went on to explain how the hostility between him and 'The Revenant' actor began in the '90s. "I was performing in my underwear at half time and I think I had blocked a shot of his. I was a punk. I was a prick. I was not nice to Leo that day."
And just as DiCaprio's disinterest in acting with him, Wahlberg thought that the former wasn't exactly cut out to play the role of Jim Carroll, either. "He wasn't a New York street guy basketball player," Wahlberg revealed to Huffington Post.
"I was like, 'I've seen this dude play ball!' So we both had a bit of chip on our shoulder. But we started reading the scenes—and I looked at him and he looked at me—and I was like, 'Oh sh*t. This guy is good.'"
Meanwhile, DiCaprio was struggling with maintaining his public image. Off-camera visuals recovered during his time in New York amid the filming were splashed across various tabloids and he was portrayed in an unflattering light, like that of a real-life bad boy which he claimed could be far off from reality.
In 1995, he told the New York Times, "So they make it sound like I go to clubs to wreck myself silly, get into fights, sleep with all the ratty girls there. It's true that while we were filming, Marky and I went out for a little dancing, a little socializing, a little flirting..."
"But people want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall."
Despite the initial animosity, the two ultimately became fast friends but the baseless story about them feuding amid the filming seemed to have just stuck and Wahlberg only came around to clear the air, some 20 years later.
Wahlberg also dished out on the fact that it was Dicaprio who helped him bag the lead role in the cult-classic teen thriller, 'Fear', which catapulted him to stardom.
Director James Foley first approached Dicaprio with the role of Reese Witherspoon's boyfriend (who eventually becomes her tormentor). However, he turned it down and endorsed Wahlberg for the part instead.
At the end of it all, although 'The Basketball Diaries' didn't do exceptionally well in the box office and received mixed reviews, it garnered a huge fan following.
And while many criticized Dicaprio as being cast mistakenly for the role, others thought his acting was spot on and possibly what sky-rocketed his talent to international fame.
And for Wahlberg, it was only the beginning of some of his best work. However, it sealed his friendship with Dicaprio no matter what the rest of the world believed about them.