Mark Wahlberg had a difficult time filming his forthcoming film, Father Stu. In the movie, Wahlberg stars as Stuart Long, an amateur boxer who, following a career-ending injury, moves to LA in search of fame and fortune. While working as a supermarket clerk, Long meets Carmen (Teresa Ruiz), a Sunday school teacher who does not care about his bad-boy charm. Doing whatever it takes to win her over, the longtime agnostic begins attending church services to impress her. But when a motorcycle accident leaves Long wondering if he can use his second chance to help others, he quickly discovers he is destined to be a priest. Transforming into a boxer figure for the film was not an easy task. In fact, Wahlberg says gaining weight “really took a toll on me.”
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Wahlberg told the media outlet that the physical transformation was not easy. “I put on 30 pounds and went from being a guy who was in fighting shape to a guy who was wheelchair-bound, suffering from a rare muscular degenerative disease,” the Four Brothers star said. “I was just turning 50 by the time we finished the movie, and I was eating 11,000 calories a day. That drastic weight gain really took a toll on me over the course of the last seven, eight months.”
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He previously told the outlet about his process of shedding the extra pounds. “I tried to do it in a healthy way,” he explained. “It was a dozen eggs and a dozen pieces of bacon, two baked potatoes, a Porterhouse steak, two bowls of white rice, and a glass of olive oil. The first two weeks were high proteins. The second two weeks were a lot of carbs. The last two weeks starches and then sodium, just to kind of get as bloated as possible.”
Losing weight wasn’t the only challenge. Wahlberg also lost his beloved mother while filming the movie. He sat down with Willie Geist on Sunday TODAY in an interview that will air on April 10 about the devastating ordeal. The movie premieres on April, 13.
“Her and my dad will always be my heroes,” Wahlberg says in the clip. “It was tough. It’s a lot easier to tell somebody else to celebrate a loss, than it is to actually do that,” he said. “But I do just really remember most of the wonderful things. It was hard to see her suffer for her last weeks and to be there watching that, and to just kind of watch her deteriorate.”
