When director Rupert Wyatt first met actor-producer Mark Wahlberg about "The Gambler," the star was shooting "Transformers: Age of Extinction" and in strapping form.
While great for an action flick and photo opportunities, such a hulking figure wasn't ideal for his self-destructive character in "The Gambler," and Wyatt felt "something needed to be done."
"Jim, his character, is a guy who lives in his head. He doesn't think of his body," Wyatt said in an interview. "Mark is a guy who's really into his health and his physicality, and a lot of the roles he plays afford that, whereas with this guy, he's a guy who has no care for his physical health. So we thought: 'He's either a guy who's going to eat too much or not enough.'
"And we decided he was going to starve."
Over the next three months, Wahlberg dropped a whopping 60 pounds to play Jim Bennett, an English professor who risks his finances and his life making high-stakes bets in underground casinos run by mobsters. With massive debts owed to dangerous characters, played by Michael Kenneth Williams, Alvin Ing and John Goodman, Jim turns to his wealthy mother (two-time Oscar winner Jessica Lange) and one of his students (Brie Larson).
The extreme weight loss helped Wahlberg "disappear into the role," said Wyatt, whose previous films include "The Escapist" and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes."
Wahlberg's prep also included meeting with the head of the English department at the University of Michigan, sitting in on university lectures and constantly reading the script.
"He's a guy who's all verbal," said Wyatt. "Everything that comes out of his mouth is this rat-a-tat fast delivery, and for an actor to retain that amount of information and be able to run it over and over and over again seamlessly is a real challenge. He has seven-page monologues that we were able to shoot in one because Mark showed up just knowing everything backwards, which you don't always get."
William Monahan wrote the screenplay for the drama that's based on a 1974 film and harkens back to a short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
While there are situations in the film that bear a close resemblance to the original on a narrative level, "the approach of this film was radically different," said Wyatt. "It's why I did it. I never wanted to emulate the original. It would have been a disservice to the original and a disservice to myself as a filmmaker."
As Wyatt saw it, this project was not a film about addiction or "a man circling the drain" but rather about "a guy who wants to use gambling as a means of escape." It explores "the notion of how we live our lives, the gambles that we make in our lives, the bets that we make, the win-or-lose nature of human existence," he said.
The English-born filmmaker, who lives in Los Angeles, identified with Jim's desire to reboot his life.
"I spent 15 years trying to get my first film made. It was my life's ambition to get something off the ground and I eventually did it and I'm lucky enough to have this career, but it brings a whole new set of challenges and sometimes you kind of think to yourself, 'Wouldn't it be great to go back to that place of making your first film?'" he said.
"Not that people are setting out to undo you, but the distractions of having opportunities can actually take you away from what you really believe in. ... I couldn't get arrested when I was trying to make my first film — nobody wanted to know me — so it allowed me to focus on doing my best work, and it's what I'm trying to get back to, in a funny sort of way, which is kind of why I did this movie in the first place."
"The Gambler" opens on Thursday.
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This content appears as provided to The Globe by the originating wire service. It has not been edited by Globe staff.