Gilded and opulent, the George V is a bastion of haute luxury just off the Champs-Élysées where crystal chandeliers twinkle in the lamplght and white orchids spill from vases in breathtaking profusion. At teatime, the air is suffused with the sounds of privilege: the delicate clink of silver spoons against fine porcelain, the tinkling of a piano playing the theme from “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” the murmur of refined voices softened by damask and brocade. It’s the kind of hotel where you can easily imagine Cary Grant sauntering by.

Indeed, Jonathan Demme is in Paris at this very moment directing a remake of Stanley Donen’s Charade, the Cary Grant– Audrey Hepburn romantic thriller, and its star has been living at the George V since March while he works on his French, takes tango lessons, practices a duet with Charles Aznavour, and gets used to wearing berets. Here he comes now, strolling jauntily past the potted palms toward a late lunch in the dining room, Le Cinq.

Oops. The scene isn’t going quite as planned. The actor is being turned away because he’s not wearing a jacket. He looks down at his outfit—sneakers, baggy pants, a black sweater with his white T-shirt hanging out—and offers a sheepish smile. The maître d’ lifts an eloquent Gallic eyebrow. We retreat to a tea table near the piano, where a flustered hotel representative soon rushes up, full of anxious assurances that the George V is so happy to have Monsieur here, and if there is anything Monsieur needs, he has only to ask. Monsieur nods calmly.

For Monsieur knows that outside the hotel, adoring fans wait around the clock, ready to shriek and swarm around him every time he comes out the door. Monsieur knows that he’s the star of the movie everyone’s expecting to be a summer blockbuster—and that every director in the business is clamoring to work with him, not to mention waving millions of dollars at him. Monsieur is not about to get ruffled over a little thing like a jacket.

Monsieur says he’s enjoying Paris, so I ask him how he likes the Louvre.

“What’s the Louvre?” he asks.

Trying to figure out Mark Wahlberg is like putting together a puzzle whose pieces simply don’t fit; he is a walking case study in extreme cognitive dissonance. Of one thing there’s no doubt: he’s hot. In June he turned 30, and July brings his debut as a bona fide action-adventure hero in Planet of the Apes, the new Tim Burton version of the hoary man-against-monkey saga, with Wahlberg (who pocketed a cool $10 million for his trouble) starring as the stranded astronaut and Helena Bonham Carter portraying a winsome simian. Although he has previously played second banana to heartthrobs such as George Clooney (in The Perfect Storm and Three Kings) and Leonardo DiCaprio (in The Basketball Diaries), this time Wahlberg has to carry a $100 million picture himself. This will obviously constitute a major test of his box-office clout, but Wahlberg says his only real concern was that he not have to wear a Charlton Heston–style loincloth.

Wahlberg’s well-muscled shoulders will also carry Rock Star, which is scheduled for fall release and co-stars Jennifer Aniston. This time he plays a rock fan so obsessed with the famous band he idolizes that he forms a “cover” band to imitate it for local audiences. When he is unexpectedly tapped to replace the star of the real band, he is catapulted into the high-flying life of a genuine rock star—with dismaying consequences.

The Charade remake, retitled The Truth About Charlie, is due to arrive next year, with Wahlberg re-creating the mysterious character played by Cary Grant in the original. He seems unfazed by the shoes he’s expected to fill. “If Thandie Newton is playing Audrey Hepburn, why can’t I give Cary Grant a crack?” he says with a mischievous grin. “I probably won’t realize what it means until it’s over and I get bashed for destroying a great part. But I’m not really scared of taking risks.”

To put it mildly. It seems like only the other day that Marky Mark was a hip-hop punk better known for dropping trou and flaunting his underpants than for his success as a rap star, since it is doubtful that his band, the Funky Bunch, despite some undeniable hits, will ever make it into anyone’s pantheon of the all-time greats. An insolent ex-con whose main claim to fame was the awe-inspiring six-pack that landed his career-making stint as a Calvin Klein underwear model, Marky Mark combined the face of a choirboy with the body and attitude of a particularly nasty piece of rough trade, an explosive admixture that reduced screaming girls and gay guys to begging for mercy.

But even that angelic face was usually twisted into a sneer, with curled lip and squinting eyes (not to mention the hand whose signature gesture was squeezing his crotch) conveying one unmistakable message, loud and clear: Fuck You. Wahlberg’s 1992 book, Marky Mark, begins, “I wanna dedicate this book to my dick,” and continues with such pearls of wisdom as a full-page diagram of the location of his infamous third nipple, an anatomical irregularity which doesn’t bother him because “it’s dope. And bitches like to suck it.”

Marky Mark? Cary Grant? Excuse me?

As he tells me earnestly about his churchgoing habits, his voice is low and smooth as butter, with no remaining trace of his Boston accent and few vestiges of the mean streets that spawned it in the rough part of town known as Dorchester. It’s a long way from Dorchester to the Avenue George V, where Wahlberg faithfully attends services every Sunday morning at the august American Cathedral. This is today’s Mark Wahlberg, you understand—the one who gets down on his knees and prays every night, as opposed to the old Mark Wahlberg, who spent his nights roaming the streets and took out a man’s eye with a metal hook when he was 16. The new and improved Mark is polite, soft-spoken, and well mannered as well as pious, the kind of young man any girl would be proud to bring home to Mother—as long as Mom never got a glimpse of the tattoos that crawl across his rippling abs and delts. (She might buy the tattooed rosary beads and cross hanging from his neck, or even his parents’ initials on his right shoulder, but what would she make of Bob Marley on his left shoulder, not to mention Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird on his left ankle?)

So which is the real Mark Wahlberg? Ahhhhhh, yes—zat is zee question. “He’s a chameleon,” says Stephen Herek, the director of Rock Star. “He can charm the pants off the president, and then he can be with his crew and all of a sudden he’s a Southie street kid from Boston. I think it’s all part of him. Who is he? Who knows. He’s all those things. Is it a con? Maybe. Is it sincere? Maybe. That’s the thing that’s exciting and dangerous about him.”

While filming The Perfect Storm, Diane Lane was stunned when two of Mark’s old friends showed up on the set and Mark, before her eyes, turned into a completely different person. Wahlberg himself shrugs off such instant metamorphoses. “Two guys I’d grown up with, who’d just done eight years in prison, came up and said, ‘Hey, what the fuck.’ So I have to speak their language,” he says. “I’ve never tried to hide where I come from. Since then I’ve tried to educate myself. For those guys, the fact that I speak the way I do now was a complete shock to them. It’s like growing up in New York and moving to Paris and speaking the language. It’s not about forgetting where you came from; it’s about adapting to the environment you’re in and learning to communicate.”

When he talks like this, he is so irresistibly sincere. He turns those puppy-dog hazel eyes on you, and gives you the sweetest smile, and it is impossible to imagine that this dear boy could ever tell you anything other than an Eagle Scout’s version of the truth. It is useful to remember that Father Flavin, Wahlberg’s former parish priest and the man who probably knows him better than anyone else, says that Mark is the greatest con artist he’s ever met. “He could be in a fight and come and tell me with those big sad eyes how the other person started it and he was just defending himself. He could turn on those tears like nothing you’ve ever seen, and you’d feel so bad for him,” Father Flavin says. “He’d get in a courtroom and you’d think he was just the best 16-year-old walking the street, out there helping old ladies. He could con anybody.”

When I ask Mark about that, a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth until it turns into dazzling grin. “That’s a big compliment, con artist,” he says, his eyes twinkling, his teeth gleaming perfect and white. “That’s what acting is about. Once you believe it, it’s not hard to convince the rest of the people.”

His friends have to adjust to his shifting personae. “He enjoys fucking with people,” says David O. Russell, who directed him in Three Kings. “There are times when he’s present and real and gentle, and then there’s times when he’s doing more of his street thing and it’s hard to get a straight answer from him.”

Growing up in a poor family, scrapping hard for everything he got, sleeping in a room with five older brothers, Mark learned very early to get over on just about everyone, including the sister whose pink bike he stole and repainted brown. (No one guessed until the brown paint started to chip off months later.) When one brother was incarcerated in a youth facility to which Nike and Converse donated defective products, he sent sneakers home to the other kids. “They’d be four sizes too big, but we were actually happy my brother was locked up, because we would get free sneakers,” Mark recalls.

Back then he thought he was the youngest of nine children, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Mark’s mother had three children out of wedlock, six with Mark’s father, Don Wahlberg, and none with her second husband, from whom she is now separated. Mark’s father was married once before, but Mark isn’t sure how many children he may have sired. “There are a couple of kids floating around that I just met at Christmas,” Mark reports. “I thought it was funny. I was like, ‘Jesus, how many kids do you have?’ Now there’s 12 in all, but there’s probably a couple more; my dad was in the army and spent a lot of time overseas. There’s a lotta people in my family.”

Mark’s Swedish-German father was a teamster who drove a truck and then a bus; his mother, an Irish girl named Alma Donnelly, who was still a teenager when she had her first child, worked many odd jobs while going to school at night and later became a nurse’s aide. “It was always about trying to provide,” says Mark. “Now that we’ve got that figured out, I can start asking questions. There’s a lotta things I don’t know. It’s time to put all the pieces together. Before, it was always: ‘What did you do?’ ‘I didn’t do it!’”

Mark was 10 when his parents split up, and he remains fiercely loyal to both: “I love my parents to death, and I think they did a remarkable job, considering the circumstances in which they lived,” he says. “My mom has regrets, but god knows she shouldn’t. She definitely held herself responsible for all the mistakes I made, even if the mistake was allowing me to convince her that it wasn’t me when it was me.”

The divorce hit the youngest Wahlberg hard. “I was preoccupied with my own pain,” Alma Wahlberg says, “and when Mark started to get into trouble I really don’t think I was seeing what was happening. I was just trying to get back on my feet. He was adorable, and everyone babied him, but when the family structure was falling apart, he was kind of lost. There was a lot of peer pressure, and he wanted to be part of the crowd.”

“I was climbing out the window and staying out all night when I was 12 or 13, and by the time I was 13 or 14, I stopped going to school,” Mark recalls. “My older brothers taught me how to get high when I was 10, and gave me a couple of beers. They thought it was funny to see me stumbling around. A lot of my family is now in A.A. But I don’t blame anybody. I took it upon myself to take it to the next level. I was getting fucked up every day and committing violent acts. When I was 13, 14, 15, I had a pretty serious cocaine problem. I was sniffing and freebasing, but I never tried heroin—never saw it, thank god. If the cool guys in my neighborhood were doing it, I would have. Being the youngest and the smallest and the most eager, I was always trying to impress the older guys. And I wasn’t scared of much at all.”

No one seemed able to control him. “I first met Mark around two in the morning, selling marijuana on the corner,” Father Flavin recalls. “He was about 15. I’d often see him drive by the church in a different car. He’d beep and wave. He’d stolen it, of course. He ran with a tough crowd, and he had a chip on his shoulder. He always played in Catholic Youth Organization basketball, and I could always count on him getting into a fight during the game. The other kids would tower over him. He’d get frustrated and haul off and clock somebody. Being small, he had to try harder than everyone else to show he was tough, or you get beat up by other kids. I used to use a story about Mark in my sermons, about one time he got in an awful fight on the street. I said, ‘Why did you get in a fight?’—and he said because a kid looked at him. He was always a fighter.”

Then one night Mark and his friends smoked the angel-dust joints they had found in someone’s freezer. They hit the streets in a rampage, robbing a pharmacy and then a liquor store, where Mark swung a metal hook at a Vietnamese refugee that gouged out his eye. He ended up serving 45 days of a two-year sentence at Deer Island, an adult prison.

“That was a dirty, rat-infested place that smelled like an old cellar, out on an island in Boston Harbor,” says Father Flavin. “Mark was scared to death, but you don’t let anyone know you’re upset or scared or hurt. I felt terrible for him, but he played that tough game very well.”

“I had to convince grown men that I was tough and dangerous when I was 16,” Mark says, not without pride. “When I was locked up, I was able to take care of myself, even though I was maybe five feet three inches and 125 pounds.”

Prison marked the turning point in his life, prompting him to do some serious soul-searching as well as to begin working out. “When I got to jail and saw all these guys I grew up with and emulated, it was a wake-up call I should have gotten a long time before,” he says. “That was it: I was one of them. I had accomplished what I set out to do. Being chased with knives and shot at—if that’s not going to wake you up, what is? A lot of people have died. A kid I know stole a police officer’s car; they blocked off the street and he smashed into a tree. One of my best friends killed his older brother—stabbed him twice—and his brother died. I know kids doing life with no parole. I thought, There’s got to be something better for me out there. I have to believe God knew that I was capable of doing some good and working to show people there’s something better than being the toughest kid in the neighborhood—being the one who’s willing to pull the trigger or rob the store. I remember being 17 and thinking, God, if I could snap my fingers and be 50, I’d do it. I didn’t know if I’d make it that far. I’m very lucky to be alive.”

His salvation was abetted by his brother Donnie, who struck gold with New Kids on the Block and believed his kid brother could make it, too. Mark, who had considerable difficulty carrying a tune, had rejected the opportunity to be part of New Kids, so Donnie composed some hip-hop arrangements, helped Mark organize a group called Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, and produced their first album, Music for the People, with his own money. Propelled by the hit singles “Good Vibrations” and “Wildside,” the album went platinum.

“When I met Marky, I’m like, ‘He’s gonna be a star.’ You could just tell,” says Scott Kalvert, who directed The Basketball Diariesas well as many Wahlberg videos, starting with “Good Vibrations” in 1991. “He just had an explosive charisma. I said, ‘You should act.’”

Success wrenched Mark out of the parochial world he had inhabited all his life. The first time Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch went on tour, he says, “I hated Europe. I didn’t know how to deal with being on my own. I never realized any world existed outside Dorchester. I thought everyone knew the same things, spoke the same language, stole from each other. Once I realized I was welcome in the rest of the world, then I just took it on myself to try to educate myself.”

Even now, even in Paris, he still yearns for his mother’s cooking. “I’ve been working so hard that all I want to do is be home,” he says, looking suddenly like a tired little boy. Home is Massachusetts, where he lives with his mother in the house Donnie bought her in Braintree: “I’m still paying rent. I don’t own a house anywhere. That’s the next big plunge. I have to figure out where first, whether in Massachusetts or on the West Coast. If it’s in Massachusetts it’s only a matter of time before I’m hanging out in the neighborhood again.”

That isn’t likely, given his ferocious appetite for work and the offers that are coming his way. When Wahlberg first decided to try acting, he wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms. His second album, You Gotta Believe, hadn’t sold as well as the first, and he grew disenchanted with the music business. But the movie industry was openly derisive about his new aspirations, as Scott Kalvert found when trying to cast Wahlberg in The Basketball Diaries. “It was very hard to get him the movie, because of the stigma,” Kalvert says. “To take yourself from Marky Mark the rapper to a serious actor—you have to will yourself to do that, because everything was against him being able to succeed. He had to work four times as hard as somebody starting from scratch, and he did it.”

“If anything, he was driven by the obvious doubts about him,” says James Foley, the director of Fear, the 1996 thriller that co-starred Reese Witherspoon. “That was a fight he took on: to wipe the sneer off people’s faces and convince them he’s a serious actor. He’s kicked major ass.”

In the process, Wahlberg transformed himself from a punk into a fiercely motivated, disciplined workhorse who wins effusive admiration from his colleagues. “He’s the poster boy for redemption,” says James Gray, who directed him in The Yards.

For many people, Wahlberg’s breakthrough performance came in Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 film, in which he played the pathetically deluded porn star Dirk Diggler, complete with a 13-inch prosthetic penis. “I was totally blown away, because he was playing somebody so against type,” says Kalvert. “That character is nothing like him. He’s not vulnerable like that character. He has always been extremely sure of himself. He knew his power. He had confidence. He’s smart as hell.”

Others still weren’t convinced. “I thought, Is this guy the dope I saw in Boogie Nights? What if he wasn’t an actor; what if he was just good at playing a hapless kind of guy?” says David O. Russell. “But when I met him, I realized he was a serious actor—and his ambition is limitless.”

Wahlberg has since shown such range that directors are lining up to work with him. Tim Burton, the director of Planet of the Apes, says he was attracted to Wahlberg by a masculine quality that reminded him of another era. “I met Mark and thought he had a certain gravity to him, a kind of Steve McQueen simplicity where you don’t have to say much,” Burton says. “I’ve always been fascinated by that type of acting where it’s minimal. But you have to have it; you can’t really tell somebody to do that.”

Wahlberg underwent another metamorphosis to play the star of a heavy-metal band, losing weight and immersing himself in a musical genre he had never even listened to. “He was a large reason I wanted to do Rock Star,” says Stephen Herek. “There’s something really electric, something wild and unexpected about him on-screen. He’s sort of a man-child. He has this mature, dangerous sexuality, but at the same time there’s a boyish innocence, and the combination is rather lethal. He has this magnetic thing, for almost any girl and even guys. It’s a vortex; people get sucked in. You see the way girls look at him, and it’s literally like a rock star, where you could just pick and choose and basically take whatever you want. He’ll be shy about it in public, but in private—look out!”

Older colleagues are both amused and amazed by the results. “Me and Spike Jonze went out with Mark one night to do it his way, which is you go nightclubbing,” reports Russell. “He’s wearing some beautiful Armani suit, and he would stand up and just be surrounded by young, beautiful women touching him. I saw a woman touching his crotch! There have been movie stars who shall remain nameless who have found him at his hotel and had their way with him. Women adore him.”

In his Catholic-altar-boy mode, Mark has claimed for years that he just wants to get married and have kids, and he purports to feel real guilt about his robust sex life. “That’s one of my weaknesses: I’ve had sex out of wedlock,” he says solemnly. “I’m 30; I wish I was already married and starting to have a family.”

But he finds it difficult to let down his guard in intimate relationships. “Being thrust from one extreme into another, it’s been hard to trust in this world in which I live and work,” he explains. “Someone who’s grown up in a privileged, sheltered background with a small family and all the attention, compared to someone like me, who’s grown up with nothing—I feel it’s impossible for them to really relate to me. I don’t make that very easy for them, because I don’t reveal everything. I’ve had a couple of bumps and bruises along the way, but because of that, I’ve also caused some bumps and bruises. I also know that if I continue to be this way, I won’t allow myself to find all the things I need to be happy. I’ve had relationships, a couple years here and there, but I’ve never really lived with anybody. You gotta protect yourself, but when you do that, you set yourself up to miss out on unconditional love.”

Wahlberg’s past liaisons include Reese Witherspoon and China Chow, and for the last couple of years he has been involved with actress Jordana Brewster, but she’s only 21 and a student at Yale. They recently broke up via long-distance telephone, although they’ve done so before and gotten back together again. Brewster’s background—she is the granddaughter of former Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr.—is clearly a hot-button issue for Mark. “There’s nothing wrong with being privileged,” he concedes. “She’s got great parents who are involved in every aspect of her life. I definitely think there might be issues I have with that.”

When I push him to explain, he looks uncomfortable and starts to fidget, his eyes darting around the room. “It reminds me of how hard I’ve had to work to get where I have,” he says finally, staring off into space with a scowl. “I have a hard time hearing about living on Fifth Avenue and having housekeepers and going to Yale. I think I was better off growing up in the world I did. If people are able to survive that, then they can survive anything. Coping skills are big on the résumé, in my book. I’m willing to learn about their world, but I also make sure I keep my world around me. I don’t have famous friends. On the day-to-day basics, I still hang out with guys from my neighborhood. It’s who I am. I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t ever want to lose it or forget about it, because there are so many kids who can gain so much inspiration just by my giving a little time. They can identify with me and get the chance to see a larger world. Giving back—that’s what it’s all about. Helping somebody to help themselves.”

These days Wahlberg, whose personal assistant is a former drug addict turned drug counselor, is obsessed with the idea of trying to do good. Although the science credits continue to thwart him, he has struggled for years to earn his high-school equivalency degree because it will make him a better role model. “Right now I’m working with the Boys Club, donating my time as well as money, building a gym for Father Flavin’s new parish,” he says. “I was named to the board of directors, and I felt like I had finally done something I could truly be proud of. It was one of the best feelings in the world. We’re sending kids on trips—the Boys Club sent 40 kids on a sports program to Texas. There is a lot of good to be done, and if I apply myself I can do some, and that’s what makes me feel good about myself. I made millions of dollars by the time I was 20, and it didn’t make me happy. I’ve done my share of bad, and when I get down on my knees every night I certainly don’t ask for any pat on the back. But as long as people really look to God and ask for help, then I think it’s there. Everyone can be forgiven. It’s just a matter of going out and working for it. I’ve only lived a third of my life, but I think the rest is going to be pretty boring for most people. There won’t be much controversy from now on. There will be a lot of positive things. It will be a challenge: hard work to do good.”

The controversies of the past seem far behind him now: the hotheadedness that provoked so many fights, the 1993 press firestorm in which he was accused of homophobia and racism, the catfight with Madonna at a Hollywood party. Wahlberg allegedly disparaged a member of Madonna’s entourage as a “homo”—a charge he has always denied—and got into a scuffle with Guy Oseary of Maverick Records, who later filed a complaint. “Young testosterone out of control” was how one observer described it. (Wahlberg says Madonna still owes him an apology.)

The current Mark is politically correct and rigorously controlled. “I have never once witnessed Mark Wahlberg become angry—not ever,” says James Foley. “I’ve never seen that toughness in his eyes expressed in anger—and I don’t want to, unless it’s between ‘Action!’ and ‘Cut!’”

Much more religious than his parents ever were, Mark believes his Catholic faith plays a crucial role in grounding him. “I go to church because it’s what I should be doing,” he says. “It’s pointing me in the right direction, making me a better person. There’s still a lot of work to be done, and I still have nightmares about going to prison—‘I didn’t do it, man! Just let me go!’ But I’m pretty sure I will do some good.”

Those goals have fueled his determination not to be lured back into rap music. “I love making music, and I do it on my own, but I haven’t recorded since ‘98,” he says. “My record company calls me all the time now that I’m successful, but the business left a bad taste in my mouth—being pushed in a certain way for commercial success, rather than doing what I thought was right for me. What people have to do to sell records is just not good. It’s always pushing the envelope, promoting negative stuff, and it has an effect. There’s a lot of damage being done to young people across the world. What’s wrong with giving people a positive image? I never thought that going to prison was something to brag about. I didn’t want to glamorize being a thug.”

Not that Wahlberg is averse to exploring the dark side he knows so well in his acting. “I prefer to play the bad guy,” he admits. “I’m always the one who roots for the bad guy. I don’t think a movie works without a great villain.”

And he does concealed menace so well—an attribute that inspired Foley to cast him as the homicidal boyfriend in Fear. “There was something in his eyes where you felt like it was the real deal—that forged-in-steel kind of tough thing where you don’t have to act it out or pose it,” says Foley. “This character had to be sexually attractive and dangerous. I’ve never seen Mark try to sell himself, try to convince anybody that he’s tough or that he’s smart. There’s just an eerie calm. You know about his past and about the potential for physical violence, and all that energy has been sublimated into the focus on being an actor. There’s a certain unbridled volcano that lurks behind those eyes.”

One thing Wahlberg avoids now is taking off his clothes for the camera. “I spent a lot of time doing it in the beginning of my career, and when I started to make films, that was what people expected of me,” he explains. “It’s not anything I’m really ashamed of, but I’d like to move forward. If people are constantly paying attention to that, they’re going to miss whatever else is going on.”

And what he wants them to pay attention to is his acting, although he is not one to make pompous pronouncements about his craft; the school of hard knocks has given him a philosophical attitude about his past as well as his present. “You always wish you could go back and do some things a little differently, but I learned a great deal, so it’s O.K.,” he says. “I don’t take myself all that seriously, so I can look back and laugh.”

Wahlberg has a lot to laugh about these days, and those who know him well think this is only the beginning. “You take somebody from the streets of Dorchester and he ends up in Paris, and that’s a guy who’s growing and transforming,” says Russell. “He’s a work in progress, and I’d like to think we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

And while some of his contemporaries succumb to the pitfalls of fame, Wahlberg seems unlikely to lose his way at this late date. “Where he came from is the reason he has such a good level head now,” says Kalvert. “A lot of these kids in Hollywood reach a pinnacle and self-destruct. Mark can do anything he wants to do, and he’s going to thrive.”

Not to mention have some fun along the way. “Life for him right now is a big party, in terms of being happy with who you are,” Herek observes.

Happiness? That’s a tall order, and Wahlberg won’t admit that he’s achieved it, only that he’s getting closer. “I think happiness is around the corner,” he says, and then flashes me a sly, knowing smile: the smile of a con artist, the smile of an irresistible rogue who knows he can get away with just about anything he wants to get away with. A Cary Grant smile. After all, even Cary Grant had to invent himself.

“You just gotta shift those gears and get around the corner,” Wahlberg says lightly, and then heads off to dance the tango with a beautiful girl.