14 DAY TRIAL // One of the movies that is getting a lot of Oscar buzz right now is “The Fighter,” based “on a true story,” and starring Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg as two brothers determined to make a splash in the boxing world.
Fans must already know that, for their respective parts, Bale had to lose a lot of weight (he’s playing a former boxing champ with a serious drug addiction), while Mark had to bulk up to make a believable character.
Neither mission was easy, the two admit in a recent interview cited by the Huffington Post. Wahlberg trained for years because production was halted at one point, while Bale put himself through hell to be thing and gaunt.
“[I] was just running like crazy. I could just run for hours on end and I felt really healthy,” Bale says of his training to become Dicky Eklund, the boxer who becomes his brother’s trainer when his career ends.
Asked about whether he got “a little extra boost” in his battle against the pounds, Bale replies with his dry sense of humor that of course he did: he also did coke every now and then to make sure the weight stayed off.
“Oh I do a lot of coke whenever I lose weight,” he laughed. “I’m not sure if it’s so funny for this movie, to say that,” he adds, realizing the joke may have been a bit too much for Eklund, whom he’s portraying in the film.
As for Wahlberg, he too had to put extra hours at the gym because he really wanted to have the body of a real boxer – and to move like one, as well. Thus, he became “Irish” Mickey Ward.
“The movie was a go then it fell apart and I just continued to train. So after four and a half, well, three and a half years, I felt confident enough to go in there and be believable as a boxer who could possibly win the welterweight title,” the actor said in the same interview.
Things are different now, and his body is already starting to show the signs of the lack of the strenuous workout it’d gotten used to while shooting.
“As far as the regimen, my new regimen consists of a bottle of red wine and a lot of food. And I’m enjoying myself, but my wife is like, you know, ‘You – you’re starting to look really bad’,” Mark said.
“The Fighter” is out in theaters in the US on December 10. Buzz online has it both Wahlberg and Bale stand to get Oscar nominations (and hopefully wins too) for their respective parts in it.