10 Weird Early Appearances By Iconic Film Characters

9. The (Original) Dirk Diggler Story

Boogie Nights is the film that made Mark Wahlberg a star. Even amongst an all-star ensemble which included the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore and Burt Reynolds proving that, oh yes, he can actually act when the material demands it, Wahlberg shines. Not bad for a guy who had, up until that point, been better known as whitebread rapper Marky Mark (of the completely unthreatening hip-hop troupe The Funky Bunch), or else that guy from the Calvin Klein underwear adverts. He broke out in Boogie Nights as Dirk Diggler, the hopelessly naive and starry-eyed small-town kid Dirk Diggler, whose impressive trousersnake lands him as the go-to star for the burgeoning porn industry in seventies Hollywood. Considering what we've seen of Wahlberg's public persona since, it's entirely possible that his childish enthusiasm and dopiness isn't actually acting; but regardless, Dirk became one of the most iconic characters in the filmography of Paul Thomas Anderson (which is saying a lot, considering Daniel Day Lewis's powerhouse turn in There Will Be Blood). The huge prosthetic schlong probably helped cement him in our memory to, to be fair. You could've born witness to that mammoth member almost a decade earlier, however, if you'd managed to get your hands on the homemade mockumentary The Dirk Diggler Story Anderson made as a sort of Boogie Nights prototype. Weirdly, the original film manages to be even seedier and more grim than the "remake", and star Michael Stein €“ a schoolfriend of Anderson's - isn't a patch on Wahlberg.