Following in the footsteps of Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey, and Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Wahlberg threw his health out the window and lost a shocking amount of weight for his role in the upcoming thriller The Gambler. At the AFI Fest premiere of the film in Hollywood on Monday, Nov. 10, the two-time Oscar nominee opened up about his decision to drop 60 pounds to play college professor and high-stakes gambler Jim Bennett. The fictional story, based on the 1974 film of the same name, required Wahlberg to be “as thin as possible,” according to director Rupert Wyatt.
“I went from 197 to — the lightest I’d ever been in a movie was in Boogie Nights, I was 138 — so I wanted to beat that,” the 5’8” star said at a post-screening discussion. “I beat it by a pound, so 137. I was losing weight while we were shooting the movie too so continuity kind of went out of the window.”
“No energy, no nutrition, and the studio, there was a complaint about that, that my lips were always looking blue,” Wahlberg said. “What the f—k do you want me to do? I haven’t eaten anything! If you make them red, I’m going to look weird, like I’ve got lipstick on, so it is what it is.”
The Lone Survivor star, who had recently bulked back up for his role in Transformers: Age of Extinction, had four months to drop the pounds, which he continued to do throughout filming.
“Once I get into it I can’t stop, so it’s a 24 hour, 7 days a week thing,” Wahlberg explained. “I stopped eating food for the first 6 weeks and just had small liquids throughout the day, then I was exercising two or three times a day.”
Though he’s already been praised for his dedication to the role, the father of four didn’t find fans in his kids or wife Rhea Durham.
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