Mark Wahlberg's SEAL rant, explained by real-life 'Lone Survivor'

Forget your theories about the underlying motivation behind Mark Wahlberg’s passionate takedown of Hollywood privilege at the Lone Survivor premiere on Tuesday. (In case you missed it, the actor said “For actors to sit there and talk about ‘Oh I went to SEAL training’? I don’t give a f-ck what you did… How f-cking dare you, while you sit in a makeup chair for two hours.”)

According to Marcus Luttrell, the former Navy SEAL whose life inspired Lone Survivor (he’s played by Wahlberg in the film), the star was simply speaking from his heart about the realities of war — and the comments were not meant to call out anyone. Wahlberg was reacting to what the moderator had asked — and perhaps an event that occurred before the presentation.

“Something else had happened before we got up on stage,” explains Luttrell, though he didn’t specify what that was. “That’s what he was pissed about or whatever.” And his brewing feelings helped launch the rant heard around the country. (The EW article alone was shared on Facebook over 80,000 times). After the speech had gone on for quite a bit, Luttrell says he tried to step in. “I leaned forward and I was like, ‘It’s cool, dude. We got this, man.'”

“We woke up the next morning and it was huge,” he says. “That’s the funny thing about the internet. The internet is a living organism now. You couldn’t kill it if you tried, I don’t think.”

Still, Luttrell says speculation about Wahlberg’s comments is completely overblown. “He was just making a point about the movie and the truths of our lives in Afghanistan,” he says. “I think he was just making a point. I guess you can’t do that anymore. People just don’t know what to do if you do that.”