Rolling the dice on a remake

Hollywood diaries

Last summer, Mark Wahlberg called James Caan to tell him that he was going to play the lead in a remake of The Gambler, the 1974 film that starred Caan. “It was a respect thing,” Caan explained, adding that the conversation didn’t end there.

Wahlberg told him that he and the new movie’s director, Rupert Wyatt, had discussed the possibility of casting Caan as a thug in the updated version. “What a horrible idea, a ridiculous distraction. Me, I thought, ‘Why even remind them?’ Then I think both came to their senses.”

Wahlberg, 43, and Caan, 74, have been friends since they met in 1999 on the set of The Yards. Caan played the corrupt owner of a company that repairs railway cars, and Wahlberg was his nephew, a soft-spoken ex-con hoping to turn his life around.

At the time, Wahlberg was still relatively new to films, and he gravitated to the older actor, celebrated for his roles as charming bruisers in The Godfather and Thief, among other movies. Later, when Wahlberg invited Caan to his house for dinner, there on the wall alongside a collection of photographs of Wahlberg’s favourite masculine heroes — James Cagney, John Garfield, Steve McQueen — hung a beautiful shot of Caan from The Gambler.

“I got it a long time ago,” Wahlberg said. “But he thought I’d just put it up there for the day because he was coming over.”

James Gray, who directed The Yards, wasn’t surprised that Caan, who grew up poor in the Bronx, and Wahlberg, a former street kid from the tough Dorchester neighbourhood in Boston, bonded easily. “How could they not?” Gray says. “Mark recognised Jimmy’s tremendous authenticity, and Jimmy was an idol of his. Jimmy sensed correctly that Mark shared his essential toughness. So Jimmy took him under his wing.”

Nearly 15 years later, the two men sat together comparing their different notes on The Gambler. Whenever Caan spoke in his gravelly voice, Wahlberg would sit up and listen intently. “Our character was a guy who only felt alive when he was gambling, win or lose,” Caan said of the original’s Axel Freed, a Harvard-educated Jewish literature professor eager to bet on anything, be it cards, roulette or a pickup basketball game with men years younger than him.

In the new The Gambler, the screenwriter, William Monahan, moved the action from New York to Los Angeles’s flashy underground betting emporiums and changed the lead’s name to Jim Bennett.

Wahlberg said his character wasn’t driven by fantasies of lining his pocket with cash or even the thrill that comes with risking it all: He compulsively borrows and loses hundreds of thousands of dollars from menacing loan sharks as well as his wealthy mother (Jessica Lange) because he is determined to set his well-appointed life on fire: “He wants to strip his character of material things so he can start from scratch,” he explained.

Wahlberg went the extra mile to prepare for the new role. For months, he worked with John Knott, a professor of English literature at the University of Michigan, and studied the books his character, who teaches a course on the modern novel, might have read. Because he didn’t attend college, Wahlberg sat in on classes at various universities, including a particularly memorable lecture on Beowulf that perhaps explained why he made Jim Bennett’s teaching style so unpredictable.

“It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and the students were on their iPads, shopping or sleeping,” Wahlberg said. “They seemed a tad bit disinterested.”

In Hong Kong, where he was filming Transformers: Age of Extinction, he set up a miniature gaming parlour in his hotel room and invited “the people in my camp: my trainer, my stand-in, the guy who’d read with me” to help him with research. “We played Texas Hold’Em,” Wahlberg recalled.

“We’d bet on the fights, basketball games, baseball games, football games, tennis matches. We played quarters on the street corners of Hong Kong. And I won more than I lost.”

He also visited the casinos of nearby Macau and, betting with money borrowed from Hong Kong friends, found his luck holding, he said. Then, perhaps to experience what it’s like not to know when to walk away, he gathered his winnings and strolled over to the roulette table.

“I put everything on black and lost everything,” he told Caan with a laugh. Wahlberg’s bankrolling pals weren’t amused. “They were going: ‘What are you doing? You just lost all of our cash.’ I go: ‘Don’t worry. You’ll understand when you see the movie.’'

What his friends will also see in The Gambler is a dissipated-looking Wahlberg, who shed his tight-T-shirted, muscled Transformer physique by going on a medically supervised liquid diet of eight ounces of almond milk, three times a day, and dropped 60 pounds.

How did Caan approach his 1974 role? He didn’t do much — no losing weight, gaining it or immersing himself in the world of high-stakes gambling. “Making this picture was pretty easy for me,” Caan said.

“I know what winning and losing is when you gamble. I didn’t have parents I could take a million dollars from. We were a lower-class family. But I was around all that stuff, guys who bet above their means. When a guy bets $20, and it’s his last $20, is there anybody that’s a bigger gambler than that?”

The New York Times