How Christian Bale Lost Huge Weight For 'The Fighter'

How Christian Bale Lost Huge Weight For 'The Fighter'

It takes a lot of training to be a boxer, and sometimes, even more to train one. Christian Bale, no stranger to epic weight loss, shed major pounds again for his role in the upcoming film, 'The Fighter.'

Speaking to Latino Review, Bale said that to play the gaunt trainer Dicky Eklund, he, "was just running like crazy. I could just run for hours on end and I felt really healthy." But did he get a little extra boost? "Oh I do a lot of coke whenever I lose weight," he joked, clarifying, "I'm not sure if it's so funny for this movie, to say that."

While Bale slimmed down, his co-stars had to bulk up. Leading man Mark Wahlberg, who plays boxer "Irish" Mickey Ward, did a lot of boxing - for quite a long time.

"The movie was a go then it fell apart and I just continued to train" he said. "So after four and a half, well, three and a half years, I felt confident enough to go in there and be believable as a boxer who could possibly win the welterweight title."

Though he still has the boxing ring he trained with in his home, it isn't getting much use.

"As far as the regimen, my new regimen consists of a bottle of red wine and a lot of food," Wahlberg told the site. "And I'm enjoying myself, but my wife is like, you know, 'You - you're starting to look really bad.'"

And as for his onscreen wife, played by Amy Adams? She was ready to rumble.

"I looked like a girl who couldn't punch, which made me want to punch him," she said of director, David O. Russell. "So I actually took just a couple boxing lessons, and that was fun, with Mark's trainer, who was fantastic. And then we just did some fight choreography. That was my biggest concern. I didn't want to hurt the girl that I was fighting."

For more on the making of the film, head over to LatinoReview.com.

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