Before Mark Wahlberg ever attempted to test his mettle vis-a-vis giant metamorphosising robots from outer space — before he befriended a heroic battle-bot named Optimus Prime on screen — the actor prepared for his latest part with an unlikely foil: a talking teddy bear with an outsize taste for prostitutes and cocaine.
Which is to say that before Wahlberg signed on to appear in Paramount Pictures’ mega-budget sci-fi thriller Transformers: Age of Extinction, he got a first taste of acting opposite computer-generated imagery in a certain raunch-comedy that became 2012’s surprise breakout hit.
“Ted was definitely a good warm-up,” Wahlberg said of the movie in which he plays a Boston bro who co-habitates with his hard-swearing, magically alive plush toy. “With Ted, it was a more intimate setting. But this movie is much bigger and more intense. You’ve got eight Autobots talking to you at the same time. There’s nothing but a pole or a stick really there. You’ve got to believe and totally commit. The most difficult part of acting is when you look ridiculous and have to confront the risk of looking foolish. You’ve got to be on the whole time. You can’t phone it in.”
The only filming hiccup came months after principal photography had wrapped up. Wahlberg had shed 60 pounds from his 197-pound frame to portray a literature professor with a gambling addiction for the 2015 remake of James Caan’s 1974 The Gambler.
“I had to come back for some pick-up shots,” Wahlberg recalled. “So when Bay saw me, he freaked. He was used to seeing me on the healthier side. But here I am skinny with long, stringy hair. He was like, ‘You can’t look like that!’”
In the end, Bay managed to film Wahlberg in a way that obscured his, ahem, transformation.
