Graham Norton recalled Mark Wahlberg saying “hell” on his show because he was so “drunk”.
“If you see someone drunk on a show, it’s because they arrived drunk. We’re not letting that happen,” the five-time BAFTA Television Award winner said at the 2025 Henley Literary Festival on Friday, according to The Independent.
Mr. Norton, 62, continued: “Mark Wahlberg was a strange person because when he arrived, he didn’t seem drunk.”
“He told me about his movie and he told me some stories about stunts gone wrong and things like that. And just 15 minutes into the show, the hell that was in his system really took hold. And it was hell,” he explained.
Norton was referring to a February 2013 episode in which Wahlberg, who was promoting Broken City at the time, kept talking about guests Sarah Silverman and Michael Fassbender. During the episode, he sat on Norton’s lap and played with her nipples.
The Irish actor said that “no one could tell the story” because “he just interjected.”
“There was one stage where Michael Fassbender was telling a story…he was getting into the heart of the anecdote. I thought, ‘This is working, why?’ and I looked at Mark Wahlberg and he was asleep. So, yeah, we don’t encourage that,” he said.
Norton also debunked rumors that producers get guests on The Graham Norton Show drunk, saying, “That’s just not the case.”
“If you want to drink, we’ll have drinks ready and waiting for you. And while we’re showing clips or preparing music, they might add you on the fly, but you’ll only have two or three drinks at most. So if anyone wants to come on the show and get drunk, my tip is to pre-load it.”
The Departed actor spoke about the controversial episode in an interview with Digital Spy a few months later.
“I tried to do it a little bit, but some people took it a little too seriously,” Wahlberg claimed.
Following the first episode, Norton also opened up about the awkward interview, telling the magazine that the “Daddy’s Home” star is “a really nice guy.”
“We’ve all had the experience of suddenly realizing, ‘I’m the drunkest person at this dinner party,’ but not knowing why,” he told Digital Spy.
“I’m not going to criticize him too harshly at all because it was kind of like that. It just happened.”
