When collaborating for ‘The Union’, Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry discovered they had a lot in common, especially when it came to parenthood.
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Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry recently teamed up for the first time for the Netflix thriller The Union. The pair found they had a lot in common, especially when it came to juggling their family lives with work.
Wahlberg noticed how well Berry handled parenting when they collaborated for The Union. The two flew all over the world for the movie. As busy as they were, Berry always managed to set aside time for her kids.
“Well, it’s pretty clear — she’s a mom first. The kids are the top priority…to see that she can balance all of those things and this career and being Halle Berry, but becoming Roxanne, and doing all these things. And I know it’s not easy, but she makes it look easy,” Wahlberg said in a recent interview with Audacy.
Meanwhile, Berry had the same sentiments for her The Union co-star.
“If one of his kids called in that moment, we’d be on a roll waiting to go, and he’d be like, ‘Hello’…He’s relentless at that. He is very available to his children,” Berry added. “He was talking to them all the time, all hours of the night… And it was also, he does a hundred things too, like all these businesses and stuff. He [is] flying somewhere and he comes back, but he comes back prepared. Like, you think somebody’s doing all this stuff he’s doing, he’d kind of be phoning it in. But he really — he knows his stuff. He’s prepared. And it was nice to work with people that are professional ’cause it doesn’t always happen today.”
Both actors have a full house. Berry currently shares two kids with her exes Olivier Martinez and Gabriel Audry. Wahlberg shares four with his wife Rhea Durham.
Berry and Wahlberg’s lives as parents also affected their careers similarly.
“I still try to, whether it be with my family or my faith, I still try to kind of maintain that artistic integrity where if it’s something that I want to do, even though I may have some explaining to do and try to finesse the situation a little bit. But as I get older, I’ve also embraced being older, playing a dad,” he said.
“I feel the same way. It certainly changed me as a mother, but what it also connected me to was [that] I don’t worry what my children will think about what I do. You know, if it’s not appropriate for them to see, then they don’t see it,” Berry added. “I still do what I wanna do as an artist. I want to instill in them [that] you have to follow your own dream, follow your passion, do what makes you tick. And part of being a mom doesn’t mean that I’m just a mom, that that defines me. I’m still an artist. I’m still a woman. I still have aspirations outside of being a mother.”
Wahlberg and Berry didn’t only bond over their families. The two are very familiar with the action genre. So both knew what it took to look and act believable in films that required peak physical fitness. Wahlberg, who served as producer for The Union, cast Berry in the film because she still maintained all the qualities of an action hero.
“I think there isn’t any reason that she wouldn’t be the most perfect person,” Wahlberg told Bossip about casting her. “I mean her strength, her poise, her talent, her physicality — I mean everything. She could do it all. Her timing — comedy, all of it. And you know any guy would believe that, you know I certainly would, and any guy that I know would believe that somebody would wait 25 years hoping that she would walk through the door.”
Thanks to Berry’s performance, Wahlberg couldn’t help but try to match his co-star’s physicality.
“When she was there, I was willing to step it up a little bit more,” Wahlberg said. “I was like ‘Well you know, look I’m getting older… I get it. Why don’t I let the young guy who looks just like me, except he’s 20 years younger, come in and and take over?’ But when she’s there you gotta step up.”
