The movie Mark Wahlberg called “emotional torture”
After wild success upon release, Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel The Lovely Bones was eventually made into a movie directed by Peter Jackson and starring Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz. The story tells of a young girl who is murdered by her neighbour and watches over her friends and family from Heaven as they struggle to come to terms with her death, simultaneously wanting revenge and needing to heal.
Before Wahlberg was cast in the film, though, Ryan Gosling was originally set to play the role of Jack Salmon. However, the studio didn’t feel that Gosling actually suited the position and ended up recasting with Wahlberg taking on the job.
Of the change in plans, producer Fran Walsh later explained to The Hollywood Reporter: “Ryan came to us two or three times and said, ‘I’m not the right person for this role. I’m too young,’. And we said, ‘No, no, no. We can age you up. We can thin your hair.’ We were very keen.”
She continued: “It wasn’t until we were in preproduction and we had the cast there that it became increasingly clear: He was so uncomfortable moving forward, and we began to feel he was not right. It was our blindness, the desire to make it work no matter what.”
Thankfully, though, Wahlberg was waiting to take Gosling’s position. However, in hindsight, the role may have been more than the actor had originally bargained for, and he once admitted that he went through “emotional torture” after starring in the drama.
“I’ve put myself through emotional torture making this movie. It’s taken me to unimaginably dark places. The Lovely Bones is a chilling story, especially if you’re a parent,” Wahlberg told Irish Central. “The murder of a child is the very last thing any mother or father ever wants to think about.”
He added: “I read about the terrible things that people do to children, and I know that if anyone like them came near my kids, I’d kill them. I’ve never been daunted by a script. But as soon as I realised what this film involved, I really had to think about whether I wanted to go to that dark place every day during filming.”
Given the nature of the script and its sheer harrowing story, it sounds like Wahlberg went through a lot in portraying a father who has recently had his daughter murdered. Still, Wahlberg’s next movie was Max Payne which saw him able to consult a different part of himself, exact revenge and exorcise some inner demons.
