Mark Wahlberg is slowing down — but he’s not coming to a complete halt just yet.
“Well, I’m certainly working harder now than ever,” Wahlberg, 52, told Cigar Aficionado for the magazine’s September/October issue. “Certain businesses, you kind of build them, pass them on or you exit. Hopefully my kids, we’ll see what their interests are, but I don’t think that I’ll be acting that much longer at the pace I am now. That’s for sure. Because that’s the most difficult thing.”
The actor — who shares daughters Ella, 20, and Grace, 13, and sons Michael, 17, and Brendan, 14, with wife Rhea Durham — has previously spoken about his desire to get out from in front of the camera in order to spend more time with his family.
In 2022, Wahlberg told Entertainment Tonight that he’d like to retire from acting “sooner rather than later, probably.”
“It’s gotta be something special to really bring me … to leave home, to leave those guys behind because it’s the biggest sacrifice in the making for sure,” he shared.
The Italian Job star already started to get out from under the glare of the Hollywood spotlight by moving his family to Las Vegas.
“To be able to give my kids a better life and follow and pursue their dreams, whether it be my daughter as an equestrian, my son as a basketball player, my younger son as a golfer, this made a lot more sense for us,” Wahlberg shared on The Talk in 2022. “We came here to just kind of give ourselves a new look, a fresh start for the kids, and there’s lot of opportunity here. I’m really excited about the future.”
One year later, the Wahlberg family was settled in Sin City — and loving it.
“They love Vegas,” the two-time Oscar nominee told E! News in April. “I spent lots of time in L.A. pursuing my interests and my career and now it’s time for them to pursue theirs. Everybody is thriving there, it’s been great.”
Still, the siren call of L.A. never fades for Wahlberg, who currently has five acting projects in post-production. During his interview with Cigar Aficionado, he spoke at length about his producing career, explaining that he took on the role of a producer “out of necessity.”
“I didn’t want to sit around waiting for Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise or whoever was already established before me and were the guys at the time, and Leo [DiCaprio] to go and pass on a movie until I could get my hands on it,” Wahlberg shared. “I was always proactive in trying to find material and things that I could produce, that I knew was right for me, create my own destiny.”
