Dad vs. Dad: Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell Feud in Daddy’s Home

In their new movie opening Christmas Day, Daddy’s Home, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg play two mismatched dads ardently competing for something they already have: the love of their kids.

The tricks and antics they use to win the children’s loyalty culminate in a wild and very early celebration of the holiday. Ferrell is the nerdish second husband of a suburban housewife and stepdad to her two children. Wahlberg is their ne’er-do-well biological father. When he arrives uninvited at Ferrell’s home, dressed in a leather jacket and biker boots and claiming the dominant paternal role in the family, the fun begins.

“Mark knows how to ride a motorcycle and wear a leather jacket and not look foolish,” Ferrell says. “I can’t. Mark is that guy in real life. I’m much more like the straight-laced guy I play in the movie—well, maybe not that nerdish. I’m perfectly fine with my level of masculinity or lack thereof. But I don’t know how to do or fix anything. Mark probably doesn’t either, but he could figure it out in a half hour.

Keeping it real

Daddy’s Home is about divorce and its powerful impact on families, something Wahlberg and Ferrell both experienced as children.

“Nowadays there are so many blended families having to cope with a stepparent and a biological parent still involved in some way,” Ferrell says. “That was the case in my growing up. I was faced with this traumatic [divorce] experience. How do you navigate that?” Ferrell’s parents divorced when he and his brother, efPatrick, were in elementary school.

“As a child, I would’ve preferred to have a magic wand, wave it and go back to how it was,” he says. “The way I coped was going, ‘Let’s make lemonade out of lemons!’ I just tried to make the best of it, maybe because I was the older brother.”

Ferrell, 48, was raised in a middle-class family in suburban Irvine, Calif., a place about as dull as Andy Griffith’s fictional TV haven of Mayberry, he says. His mother, Betty Kay, was a schoolteacher and his father, Roy Lee, was a successful musician with the Righteous Brothers.