Mark Wahlberg spills on his feud with Leonardo DiCaprio

Cape Town - Turns out there was a time fellow A-lister actors Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo Dicaprio weren’t buddies.

In a talk at the 2018 LEAP Foundation Conference, Mark (47) – who’s now on good terms with Leo (43) – recalled how he and Leo feuded when they were in their twenties over the 1995 film The Basketball Diaries, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In the coming-of-age movie Leo plays a high-school basketball star who falls into the grip of drug addiction. Mark plays his best friend.

“He didn’t want me for the part, and I didn’t think he was right for the part,” Mark said. “We both had to really learn how to respect each other, and we earned it.”

At the time Leo was a rising star in Tinseltown, having just made the transition from TV (Growing Pains) to film (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, This Boy’s Life). Mark meanwhile was known as Marky Mark – a cocky, pants-dropping, shirtless rapper and underwear model.

Leo apparently didn’t want a rapper on the movie while Mark for his part wasn’t impressed with his co-star either. “He [Leo] wasn’t a New York street guy basketball player. I was like, ‘I’ve seen this dude play ball!’ So we both had a bit of a chip on our shoulder,” he said in an interview in 2015.

Luckily for Mark the movie’s director, Scott Kalvert, saw promise in him and he and Leo ended up putting their egos aside and digging into their characters.

The movie went on to become a cult classic, catapulting Mark’s career. Today he’s one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and last year topped the list of the world’s highest-paid actors, Daily Mail reports.

And the two, who teamed up again in Martin Scorsese’s gangster drama The Departed (2006), are clearly on good terms now.