Mark Wahlberg drops pounds for the upcoming movie, ‘The Gambler’
Mark Wahlberg gained weight to play a bodybuilder in Pain & Gain, but his latest role in The Gambler shows the actor losing 60 pounds for the role.
Off-screen, Wahlberg had to wait until he finished shooting Transformers: Age of Extinction before dropping the weight on a medically supervised liquid diet — going from 197 to 137 pounds.
“Losing 60 pounds was not fun. I was never a happy guy being deprived of food,” says Wahlberg. “I like to eat six or seven meals a day. But we had to get rid of that stuff.”
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The Gambler is a remake of the 1974 James Caan movie written by James Toback and directed by Rupert Wyatt. The movie debuts on November 6th at AFI festival and will hit theaters on December 19th. The Gambler stars John Goodman, Brie Larson, as Mark Wahlberg plays a professor of literature who has a gambling problem and runs into a group of gangsters that threaten more than his life.
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Wahlberg grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Dorchester, Mass., and dropped out of high school; he just completed his high school diploma online last year at age 42.
“Forget losing the weight,” he says. “Being believable as a teacher was one of my greatest challenges and most rewarding. It meant being able to have the comfort to really understand and say those words.”
For months before showing up on set, Wahlberg pored over the script, became versed in every literary mention and sat through university lectures for inspiration. He is ready to show his Jim Bennett to the world. [USA Today]
It seems as though losing weight has become the latest trend in Hollywood since Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto lost nearly 90 pounds and won Academy Awards.
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