The bizarre 11,000 calorie diet Mark Wahlberg followed for a terrible movie
There are some actors in Hollywood who continually prevent themselves from reaching a higher level of acclaim by starring in awful movies, despite having many critically successful titles under their belt. Such is the case for Mark Wahlberg, who has managed to bag several Academy Award nominations while also routinely accepting parts in terrible comedies.
The actor rose to prominence after starring in Boogie Nights as a high-school-dropout-turned-pornstar, which led him to appear in some incredibly commercially successful films, such as The Perfect Storm and Planet of the Apes. He earned an Academy Award nomination for his role in The Departed, and later received another nod from the Oscars for his co-producing role on The Fighter, in which he also starred.
Despite performing in various celebrated films, Wahlberg has also indulged in his fair share of awful ones. He teamed up with Kevin Hart for Me Time in 2022, which is probably one of his worst movies. Then there’s the very negatively reviewed Max Payne, two Transformers movies, Daddy’s Home and its sequel, The Family Plan, The Happening and Entourage.
Another poor effort is Father Stu, which was released the same year as the disastrous Me Time and Uncharted, which garnered a mixed reception. It seems as though 2022 was not Wahlberg’s year. The actor appeared as the leading character and the producer of Father Stu, which was not as universally derided as Me Time, but it still wasn’t great. It’s one of those forgettable dramas which you’ll probably never want to rewatch, its plot slipping out of your mind as soon as the end credits roll.
Yet, Wahlberg dedicated himself to the role, clearly inspired by method actors like Christian Bale and Daniel Day-Lewis, who have both made drastic changes to their appearances for movies. Most notably, Bale once dropped 62 lbs for The Machinist and gained 40 lbs for Vice, completely altering his lifestyle for the sake of his art.
For Father Stu, Wahlberg put on 30 lbs in just six weeks. This intense weight gain had to happen relatively quickly, so the actor decided to approach the issue in a rather unhealthy way – by downing glasses of olive oil. Talking to Entertainment Weekly, he explained, “I started with 7,000 calories for the first two weeks and then 11,000 calories for the final four weeks.”
The excitement of getting to gorge on food quickly took its toll: “None of it was fun, except for the first meal was amazing, because I hadn’t eaten anything up until that point. But after that, when you’re already full and you have to eat again, and at my age it’s just not a healthy thing to do, to try to put on that kind of weight in that amount of time.”
He didn’t get to eat any particularly fun foods either, Wahlberg asserted, “I wasn’t eating anything that you would think,” like pizzas and ice cream. Instead, he was forced to eat massive portions of protein-rich foods – just with a glass of oil on the side. “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. So not a lot of fun.”
