Mark Wahlberg

Hopefully you haven’t been taking Mark Wahlberg for granted over the last few years—like, say, by making jokes about how he said things on a certain day might not have “went down” like they did if he had been there—because the Mark Wahlberg we all know and love(?) won’t be around too much longer.

It’s not that he’s dying (though it seems like he thinks he will soon now that he’s hit the unthinkably advanced age of 52), it’s that he’s at a point in his life where he’s ready to rethink his acting career.

This came up in an interview with Yahoo!, where he revealed that he really likes making movies “that the whole entire family can see” (so more like The Family Plan and less like Boogie Nights). “Look, I’m 52 years old now,” he explained to Yahoo!, adding that he likes “playing age-appropriate roles” these days because other actors his age “don’t embrace that” and audiences can react poorly when something like that “doesn’t seem real.”

He also mentioned his four kids, so it seems like he’s specifically referring to the fact that he’s dad-aged and he wants to play dad-aged characters in movies that dads can show their kids—though Wahlberg’s youngest child is 14, so it’s not like this is a brand new thing in his life.

He’s also particularly concerned with being in movies where “the guy and the gal” are “in the same age bracket,” which is another thing that he says audiences “frown upon.” And, you know what? He’s right about that! And if a guy like Mark Wahlberg who presumably has some pull in showbiz is out there saying “I only want to do a movie if the ‘gal’ is the same age as me,” then that might lead to more/better roles for women in Hollywood.

52 isn’t old for a man in Hollywood, but the same can’t be said for women, so maybe everyone wins when Mark Wahlberg walks away from big movies in favor of more ignorable stuff like The Family Plan and Instant Family and Daddy’s Home and Family Daddy. (That last one’s not real yet.)