The actor Mark Wahlberg is sitting beside me on a sofa in a Beverly Hills hotel, muscles bulging out of his T-shirt, immaculate white trainers resting on a chair, as he tells me about the aggressive figure ruining his home life. “He’s angry, he gets violent,” he says, his face full of defeat, even though he’s no stranger to the rough stuff himself, having played countless hard guys in Hollywood movies after serving jail time for assault in his youth. “And then he goes to the bathroom right on the floor and wipes himself on the floor,” sighs the man who posed topless with Kate Moss in Calvin Klein underwear ads that seemed to cover every London bus in the 90s. “And he likes to do that in front of me and then give me a look, like, go pick that up, before he walks out.”

Mark Wahlberg, who also starred as the porn star Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights, but who has now found God and starts every day with prayer, sighs.

It must be quite a sight, this bum-wiping, given that we are discussing the Wahlberg family’s Pomeranian dog, who appears, in pictures published on his own Instagram account, to be less than a foot long and made only from fluff and eyes. And given that the floor is that of the Beverly Hills mansion shared by Mark with his wife and four children, which not only has a chapel, a cinema and a pool, but also its own golf course – what an image it creates in my mind’s eye, this ball of fluff wiping his bum on the floor.

Yet I’m confused. Of course, I know that Instagram’s a sham, but every time I’ve seen Mark bellow “Number one Pomeranian on the ’gram!” in a video, beseeching his 14.5m followers to look at Champeranian’s own account, I thought the enthusiasm was real. Turns out he’s been doing it under duress from one of his sons, Brendan, “whose life mission is to get me to post as many things as I can about Champ, and get him as many followers as he can. He’s obsessed with it. It’s starting to become… a thing.”

While we’re on the subject of violent antics, I want to talk about Wahlberg’s latest movie, Spenser Confidential, made for Netflix. Wahlberg plays Spenser, a former cop who has served five years in jail for trying to expose his corrupt colleagues, only to get released and find they’re still after him. Directed by Peter Berg, with whom Wahlberg also made Patriots Day and Lone Survivor, the film straddles a border between comedy and action, with the action winning out.

Wahlberg is the sort of actor who wants to be absolutely on top of the script. He reads it “three to four times a day” to “really know where we are, continuity-wise. I like to know what we’re doing and how we’re doing it,” he says, and adds that last sentence firmly, as if he has little patience for messing about. “At one point, Pete was trying to push the humour, and then we pulled it back a little bit, I think. I think you can get into some trouble, trying too hard for comedy – it’s just a fine line.”

I've made a lot of terrible mistakes – and paid for them dearly

It’s the violence I want to discuss anyway. Wahlberg says that growing up the youngest of nine children in a deprived area of Boston, he was bullied by older brothers, “and when I walked out my door – violence is also all that was there.” Aged 13, he had an opportunity to join his brother Donnie in New Kids on the Block, a globally successful boy band, but he left after a few months, perhaps inevitably, given that he was already in trouble with the police and addicted to cocaine and other substances. He later found his own music success as Marky Mark, in Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, and the acting followed. But of his youth, he stresses: “I was always in trouble, and I was kind of little. In the circumstances where I was being preyed upon, at times, I had to protect and defend myself. It’s not an easy thing to navigate as a teenage kid who’s 5ft 2in, 120lb, with grown men.”

It was decades ago now, and clearly not something he wants to discuss for the rest of his life, but there was a racist element to some of his crimes; particularly when, while high on the drug PCP, he assaulted a Vietnamese shopkeeper and used racial slurs against him. Wahlberg served a brief sentence for it; the shopkeeper has since said that he publicly forgives him. I put it to Wahlberg that, if he were a new actor coming up now, with that kind of record, he would or should get cancelled. Hollywood is trying to do the right thing, morally, at the moment.

Top marks: starring in Ted with Mila Kunis, which Wahlberg says is his best work. Photograph: Universal/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

“Well…” he exhales. “I don’t know. I think it would be easy to look at it and say that, but having been through it and experienced it, I think it’s a different thing. You see the gentleman who just came in here?”

He is referring to a burly man who just popped in for a goodbye hug, covered in tattoos, and who plays a small role in Spenser Confidential.

“He just did 16 years in prison. OK? He got out and I put him in the movie. That could have easily been my life. Being in a situation like that and having nothing else – certainly I made a lot of terrible mistakes and I paid for those mistakes dearly.” He says that people often think of being incarcerated as though it’s a badge of honour, “but having been in that situation, it’s not”. He realised that the only way to change his circumstances was “to actually change them”, and then he “did the work. I took it upon myself to own up to my mistakes and go against the grain and not be a part of the gang any more – to say that I was going to go and do my own thing. Which made it 10 times more difficult to walk from my home to the train station, to go to school, to go to work.”

So you made yourself more vulnerable? “Oh absolutely. But I also prided myself on doing the right thing and turning my life around. Whether I found myself venturing off into Hollywood and a music career, or working a 9-to-5 job as a construction worker, whatever path I was going to take, I was going to do the right thing. So I think no, judging a person on what he’s doing and where he’s coming from and all those things, no, I would hope that people would be able to get a second chance in life.

Boy band: with his brother Donnie in New Kids On The Block, 1989. Photograph: L Busacca/WireImage

There have been benefits from all of this, he says. “I do think the one thing I have to my advantage is that I have all this real life experience that I can apply to my work,” he says. “I think audiences can definitely sense authenticity. But that came with a real price.”

So why, then, would he play such violent characters if the very impulse is something he wants to get away from? He has a huge resumé of playing boxers, bruisers and bent cops. He won a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for The Departed, directed by Martin Scorsese, in which he plays a killer. And his work as a producer on The Fighter and Boardwalk Empire, with equal amounts of fighting and pain, is also much admired and award-nominated.

‘I’ve seen her since then and said hello. I think we saw each other at a concert here and there’: with Kate Moss advertising Calvin Klein. Photograph: Calvin Klein

There have been comedies, too, such as the Daddy’s Home movies, where his machismo is pitched against the goofiness of Will Ferrell. (A couple of years ago Wahlberg revealed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that he had found out that one of his daughters was having private Instagram chats with Will Ferrell’s son Magnus – Mark was “disturbed” but then realised, if she was going to be with somebody, it would be good if it was someone who was similar to his friend Will.)

Boogie Nights made Wahlberg hugely famous, though he has said since that he has some regrets about it, that it doesn’t quite fit in with the Catholicism to which he is now devoted, getting up early every morning to make time for “the scriptures and my devotionals”, and attending Mass each week. He recently posted an Instagram video of his face with the mark of the cross on it in ash, having attended an Ash Wednesday service in LA. His best work, he says, might just be Ted, the unlikely story of a man who continues into adulthood with his best friend, a talking teddy bear. Yet even that has a fight scene in it – one which he only lets his kids watch with the sound off, because his character shouts “Teddy Rux-fuckin’-pin!”

So why, in this holier life, so much fighting? Spenser Confidential is full of the stuff, I say. Wahlberg is confused – he wonders if I’m bringing this up because I’m English. “I keep trying to remember,” he says. “I don’t remember it being all that violent… Yeah he gets beat up a couple of times, but it’s not like he’s beating everybody up. He’s a relatable guy! He’s not some superhuman. But I know there’s a complete difference between what UK audiences find or deem violent versus the US.”

I talk through some of the scenes, such as the one where about eight gangsters come at him with machetes and he despatches them all with his fists, before his friend drives a car through the restaurant wall. There’s the bunch of prisoners he hurls over furniture when they ambush him (one is played by the rapper Post Malone), the group of corrupt cops who beat him up, the woman who is murdered, her body thrown into a car boot – I could go on.

I don’t think my kids have been in a real fight – except with each other

“Right,” he says, still perplexed, “so there’s just a couple of fights?”

If this is where he sets the bar, I’m starting to wonder if the number one Pomeranian on the ’gram, whom he does describe as violent, might actually have murdered several people.

Yet he insists he’d be interested in a romcom, sure. “I’d be into it! But nothing with singing and dancing in it. I’m not doing a musical,” he says, firmly. “I’ve had to sing and dance more than I’ve wanted to… in films. And it’s my least favourite thing to do. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not really self-conscious and I’m not scared to look vulnerable, or risk looking ridiculous, but I don’t know…” His voice goes very low, quiet, but there’s a grin in it. “I feel ridiculous when I’m dancing and singing.”

So no more Marky Mark, and presumably he’s not going to do any more underwear modelling either. I ask if he ever made up with Kate Moss, who has said she hated working with him on the Calvin Klein shoots.

Mark Wahlberg turns to properly face me. “I never really had a problem with Kate, did I?”

Hole in one: Wahlberg’s home has a chapel, cinema, pool and its own golf course. Photograph: The Riker Brothers

She said she had a bad time. Does he remember it differently? “Well… bad time…” he repeats, questioningly, apparently unaware that what she actually told Vanity Fair was that she hated having to press her naked breasts against him, that he was unpleasant about her slender figure, and that she lay in bed for the next two weeks feeling like she was going to die.

“I think I was probably a little rough around the edges. Kind of doing my thing,” he says, his eyes glinting mischievously at the memory of whatever his thing was. “I wasn’t very… worldly, let’s say that,” he says, laughing. “But I’ve seen her and said hello. I think we saw each other at a concert here and there, we said hi and exchanged pleasantries.”

On the subject of women’s bodies, I bring up the fact that we’re in the Four Seasons, where many of the Harvey Weinstein accusations played out. When we meet, Weinstein has just been found guilty of two related charges in a New York court. I ask if everyone in LA is talking about it. “I’ve certainly been paying a lot of attention to what’s been going on with the criminal case and everything,” Wahlberg says. “There’s finally a lot of closure for a lot of people. But I don’t know, I’m so out of the loop with Hollywood.”

Really? But you live right here, just down the road, and you work prolifically in the industry.

“Yeah, but other than working, I go to the supermarket. I don’t go to dinner parties on the scene, or screenings. I live in Beverly Hills, but it could easily be the English countryside, because I don’t see anyone and I don’t do anything. I don’t go to awards unless I have a movie in them. I go to bed early, I get up early, I take my kids to school and I’m with my wife if I’m not I’m working.”

Clear run: in Patriot’s Day. Photograph: Karen Ballard

I wonder if it’s strange raising these Beverly Hills children, who go to a privileged Catholic school and who’ve never known any other life. Wahlberg owns a chain of burger restaurants called, you guessed it, Wahlburgers – there is a branch in Covent Garden – and has investments in gyms, because of his passion for fitness, and other businesses. His personal wealth has been estimated at $250m.

He says yes. “I don’t think any of my kids has ever been in a real fight,” he says. “Other than with each other. My son was into boxing for a while, and I was perfectly fine with that because there are disciplines to learn, and I think it’s one of the most difficult but most effective forms of exercise. But no, I didn’t think, like, ‘Oh my God, if something happens at school you can protect yourself’ – it’s not that kind of school.”

When Mark and his brothers get together to retell old stories, Wahlberg’s kids “make fun of it, like, ‘oh God here we go, Dad and his street stories, whatever Dad.’ They’re not impressed. Well they don’t act impressed, that’s for sure.” The kids don’t even really like to watch movies with him in; they prefer YouTube and TikTok – and hanging out with the Pomeranian pup, “who, it has to be said, brings them so much love. And joy.” He smiles – or is it a grimace? Hard to say.

Spenser Confidential is out on Netflix now