Do we like them?

Do we like Mark Webber?

Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up, but I could only confirm his early career, so a middling score is the honest one.

Mark Webber is a Philadelphia actor who went on to write and direct. He went to the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, and made his screen debut in the 1998 film Edge City. He later worked in low-budget films and played opposite Bill Murray in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers.

The formative part of his story is how he grew up. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that as a young child he and his mother, the activist Cheri Honkala, sometimes lived out of a car and stayed in abandoned buildings. That background sits underneath the working-class Philadelphia stories he later chose to tell.

His directing debut, Explicit Ills, was set in neighbourhoods he knew. He told the Inquirer he wanted to shoot in his hometown, and said “There's a little bit of me in every character, really.” By then he was living in Los Angeles, but the film kept him tied to home.

On the harm test, here is the honest bit: I found no reporting of him pushing harm against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no sign he keeps company with people who do. That's a lack of evidence, not a deep dive. Several of the pages I tried to open for his recent work and a 2019 TV recasting row wouldn't load, so I've left that out rather than guess.

On the good-person test, no convictions, lawsuits or credible allegations against him turned up in my searches. I also couldn't confirm any specific charity work from reliable sources, so I'm not crediting him with any. What's left is a working artist who has told stories about the city and people he came from.