At first, Leo didn't want Mark Wahlberg for The Basketball Diaries

“I met Scott Kalvert the director, who hadn’t done a movie before. He had done those Marky Mark videos so I thought that might be a bit of a problem. I wanted to do this movie but I didn’t want it to turn out to be some “After School Special” about drugs, which is how it could have been. But when I met Scott he seemed like a cool guy. He didn’t have all that Hollywood director *beep* going on. And he was willing to listen to my opinions.” Inevitably this new status led to clashes with the director. DiCaprio goes on, “I’ll tell you this story: we were looking for someone to play this kid Mickey, and Scott wanted to bring in Marky Mark. He’d worked with him and really liked him. And like any normal human being I freaked out! I figured someone who is a singer-of, what’s more, music I don’t particularly like- was not right for the part. I told Scott we couldn’t audition him. He said: “I worked with Marky and you gotta stop thinking that he’s gonna pull some macho thing with the film. He’s not like that. When you get to know him he’s a really cool guy.” And I said: “No. No. No. Absolutely NO.” I told Scott that there were plenty of cool people out there-just find one of them. But then finally I thought about it and said: “Look I know if I had done something like Marky Mark did, and had a bad reputation, I’d feel really bad if some young actor wrote me off because he was in some good place in his career.” We read so many kids for the character but everyone just didn’t get it. And so I met Marky and as soon as I met him I wanted to find something wrong with him because I had this fear of what other people were gonna think of him and what I’m gonna think of him, like he’s gonna do something terrible in the movie.