Oh baby: Mark Wahlberg is a hit at ‘The Fighter’ premiere
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In ‘The Fighter,’ Mark Wahlberg plays a tough guy — a down-on-his-luck boxer trying to make a comeback. But in real life, the actor might just be a big softie.
At the film’s Hollywood premiere Monday evening, he was doing the press rounds on the red carpet when one fan — standing behind a barricade on Hollywood Boulevard — began shouting in Wahlberg’s direction.
‘Can you take a picture with my baby?’ the fan yelled.
Wahlberg politely declined — after all, the baby was a good 5 feet from him. But the fan persisted, getting a cameraman to awkwardly pass his child to Wahlberg, who grinned and posed with the frightened-looking baby.
When the actor’s attention was off the baby, he talked about the serious effort it required to make such a dramatic physical transformation.
‘I had to trim down a lot more,’ Wahlberg said of his workout routine. ‘I usually walk around at 185, 190. Micky [Ward, whom Wahlberg plays] fought at 140, 147. I didn’t get down that low.’
He put in the work, he said, because he wanted his appearance to look authentic.
‘We wanted it to look like a boxer who could win the title, not an actor who was shot the right way and cut the right way who looked decent in the ring with doubles and stuff like that. We didn’t want that at all.’
Keep going to watch an interview with actress Melissa Leo, who plays Ward’s mother in the film. ‘The Fighter,’ which also stars Christian Bale and Amy Adams, opens Friday. Click the pic of Bale and former boxer Dickie Eklund, above, to see photos from the red carpet.
— Amy Kaufman