-By Warner Todd Huston
Actor Mark Wahlberg thinks fellow actor Tom Cruise is a jerk for comparing acting to what our solders have to go through in a tour in Afghanistan. “How F*cking Dare You,” Wahlberg said to Cruise.
A few weeks ago, news broke that Cruise seemed to compare being an actor to serving a tour in Afghanistan during comments he made in a legal deposition.
The court case from which the deposition came is Cruise’s libel suit against magazine publisher Bauer Publishing. He’s suing them for printing the claim that he had abandoned his daughter, Suri, and now ex-wife Katie Holmes.
It wasn’t long before websites like TMZ were posting headlines saying things like: “Tom Cruise — My Job’s As Hard As Fighting in Afghanistan.”
Well, actor Mark Wahlberg is incensed by this idiotic comparison of acting to what our troops have to go through.
During a panel for TMZ about his upcoming military movie, Lone Survivor, Wahlberg was explicitly dismissive of actors imagining that they have a though job. (Foul language warning)
For actors to sit there and talk about ‘Oh I went to SEAL training,’ and I slept on the–I don’t give a fuck what you did. You don’t do what these guys did, you just don’t For somebody to sit there and say my job was as difficult as somebody in the military’s. How fucking dare you? While you sit in a makeup chair for two hours.
I don’t give a shit if you’re getting your ass busted. You get to go home at the end of the day. You get to go to your hotel room. You get to order fucking chicken. Or your steak. Bottle of Cabernet, or whatever the fuck it is.”
Wahlberg is right, of course. While no one who has ever been involved in movie making would say that it is necessarily an easy job (and, yes, I have been in a few movies myself and know it is long, long hours), acting is absolutely, in no way whatever, as difficult, as emotionally precarious, and as life threatening as serving in our armed forces in hot zones like Afghanistan.
As Wahlberg says, at the end of the day you are back in your hotel room eating like a king and sleeping in a nice, cozy bed.
But, let’s back up just a bit, here. Did Cruise really say what the bad publicity makes it seem like he said?
The truth is, he didn’t quite compare acting to a tour in Afghanistan.
Here is what Cruise actually said in the deposition (courtesy of CNN’s Jake Tapper):
“Now your counsel has publicly equated your absence from Suri for these extended periods of time as being analogous to someone fighting in Afghanistan,” opposing counsel asks him. “Are you aware of that?”
“I didn’t hear the Afghanistan,” Cruise replies. “That’s what it feels like and certainly on this last movie it was brutal. it was brutal.”
“Do you believe that the situations are the same?” Cruise is asked.
“Oh come on,” Cruise says, “you know, we’re making a movie.”
That last sentence is key. He dismissed the idea of a direct comparison.
But what do you guys think?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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