Basketball Diaries, in which they co-starred, is one of the movies that kick-started Mark Wahlberg’s career as an actor — so, where he really tried to renovate himself from violent douchecanoe into a functional human being. (We were not that many years removed here from him breaking his neighbor’s jaw in 1992, and less than a decade from some of the things in the “Hate Crimes” section of his Wikipedia page.) Marky Mark looks ridiculous here, like he is about to throw a keg party at his parents’ farm in the wilds of Alberta (a look with which I am familiar; thanks, high school!), but I’m not even that interested in him; it’s more interesting to me to look at this and know what a huge international star Leo would become. At the risk of cracking open a Twitter argument that was pretty annoying, Slate ran a piece about whether Leo was a movie star before Titanic, and people were TERRIBLY indignant about the idea that he might not have been, given that he had been in movies. But being in movies, and being A Movie Star, are not quite the same thing. I think… granted, I don’t have a great working Leo knowledge because I was never a particular fan of his. But potentially, you could argue that Leo was at the “well-known actor” phase in the early-to-mid ’90s, started winning over teen girls after Romeo + Juliet in 1996, but didn’t become a full-on international First Name Only heartthrob sensation until Titanic. Anyway, I look back at this squirrelly kid in his barely fitting suit, and I think, “Damn, you have a WILD ride ahead of you. Don’t take fashion advice from Marky Mark.”
