Mark Wahlberg is realizing he may have come up with a half-baked plan to make his muscular physique rapidly depart.
The 50-year-old The Departed star visited The Tonight Show on Thursday, July 15 to promote his forthcoming drama Joe Bell. During the interview, host Jimmy Fallon asked about the recent shoot for his latest film, Stu, during which Mark at one point gained at least 20 pounds over the course of three weeks to portray a real-life boxer turned priest.
When he spoke with Jimmy Kimmel back in April, just before the process had begun, Mark sounded downright ebullient about the chance to gain a significant amount of weight over the course of the 30-day film shoot. However, as he explained to Jimmy Fallon, he has since learned this was perhaps not the wisest choice.
"Unfortunately, I had to consume, for two weeks, 7,000 calories, and then for another two weeks, 11,000 calories," the star shared. "And it was fun for about an hour. It's such a hard, physical thing to do. Losing weight, you just kind of tough it out—you just don't eat, and exercise. And this, even when you're full, I would wake up after a meal and have another meal. I was eating every three hours. It was not fun."
Jimmy pointed out that Mark recently turned 50, and then asked whether gaining and losing weight for a role gets harder as a person ages. "Yeah, absolutely," the Oscar nominee replied. "Once the metabolism starts to slow down, it gets really difficult. I was trying to get this movie made for six years, we only had 30 days to shoot it, and so I wanted to really make it happen."
He added, "And [I] was also crazy to have financed a lot of it myself. So I knew I was on a ticking clock on my own dime, and you get things done pretty quickly when that's the case."
Mark appears to be back to his familiar physique, and he has recently posted numerous Instagram videos showing himself sticking to a strict fitness regimen. Still, his Fallon interview was a far cry from his April 8 appearance on Kimmel, when Mark sounded positively thrilled that he was about to have an opportunity to eat whatever his heart desired.
"They want me to do it as healthy as possible," the Ted actor had said at that time. "I'm like, 'Dude, I've been on such a regimen for so long, I just want to eat everything in sight.' I want to go to bakeries, I want to go to Denny's, I want to get pancakes. I want to get everything that I could possibly get my hands on."
In other words, this experience wasn't necessarily a recipe for disaster, but it was definitely food for thought for the next time he cooks up a similar plan.
Catch the full interview in the above video.