Whenever you open Instagram or TikTok, you’ve probably seen Mark Wahlberg jumping in an ice bath at 4 a.m. or squeezing in a third set of bicep curls in the dead of night. What you don’t see is us coaching him behind the camera, because we are Mark Wahlberg’s phalanx of personal trainers, and we are pretty much just fucking with him at this point.
Messing with Mark Wahlberg is easy and fun because Mark Wahlberg will do anything we tell him to.
“Jump into this dumpster filled with rocks and soy sauce,” we say.
“It will make me strong?” Mark Wahlberg looks up at us with wide eyes and a wet nose.
“Yes, Mark Wahlberg,” we chuckle. “Soy sauce is made of salt. Salt makes you powerful.”
“Slow down,” Mark Wahlberg screams. “Facts make the top of my body hurt! They make the top of my body hurt so bad!”
Mark Wahlberg is training. He learns ancient burpee wisdom from Adidas scholars and drinks smoothies the color of living manatee skin. Eight times a year, he releases a new movie where he plays a dad who snaps men’s necks in empty rooms inside shopping malls. In many of these pictures, his stunts are like: running down boulevards, using a parachute, punching with some occasional kicking. You don’t need to have less than 4 percent body fat to do these things. Please, no one tell Mark Wahlberg this. Oh God, hear our truth: We just managed to convince Mark Wahlberg that hedgehogs are the new white meat, for no reason other than our own hubris. We know that we will not see heaven for this.
Mark Wahlberg pauses.
“It will make me strong?” asks Mark Wahlberg.
“Yes, Mark Wahlberg,” we say. “One ounce of cat semen has more protein than a hamburger.”
Some of us protest treating Mark Wahlberg this way. We banish those trainers to the basement where Donnie lives.
Why do we do this? Why do we lie and thus ensnare Mark Wahlberg in our lie prison? No time to ponder; we have to convince Mark Wahlberg that running through a car wash over and over again will make his biceps bigger. Many of us have to keep spraying him with a hose to keep him from chewing the wet rubber flaps. We wonder, as we often do, if this was worth quitting our jobs at Google for. Oh no, we looked away for a minute, and now Mark Wahlberg is trapped on the median of the highway, barking in fear.
“I don’t know if I want to drag this car into the ocean,” Mark Wahlberg says.
“Weird,” we say, “Jesus did it.” And he just takes off running. Mark Wahlberg’s only two goals in the world are to become more jacked than the Son of God and also to make people forget that he once partially blinded a Vietnamese man during a hate crime. We can help with one of those.
Have you ever seen Mark Wahlberg drink a hard smoothie of fish eyes blended with lightbulb filaments? We have, and we do not have the words to convey how hauntingly beautiful it was. We told him that it was good to puke during a workout, and he looked at us like a basketball dog. So we petted his head, and he smiled. Then he barfed a computer chip out of his mouth.
Mark Wahlberg completes a cold plunge. Then he completes a hot plunge. Then we graft a newborn baby’s foreskin onto his foreskin to enhance the strength of his penis. We hear the sobs of our colleagues in the basement as Donnie forces them to watch Blue Bloods again. We pray for what is left of their souls.
“What time is it?” Mark Wahlberg is groggy. It is 4 p.m., and he has just woken up from a ninety-second nap.
We decide to tell Mark Wahlberg that it is 1:30 a.m. and also the year is 1972 and George McGovern has just been elected president.
Mark Wahlberg’s eyes turn into exclamation points, and his hair explodes. He just starts going nuts on his punching bag, and soon the punching bag explodes, and it’s full of his pubic hair clippings, and he starts screaming like his brain is a microwave with a fork in it.
“Lol,” we say. “Whoops.”
Mark Wahlberg grunts and strains inside your phone. “Happy Sunday,” he says as the camera pans up and down his Municipal-clad body. “Stay prayed up,” he adds.
Our work is hard but worthwhile. We exchange proud looks among ourselves. No one, not even you, can tell that this is our fourteenth Mark Wahlberg.