While Tom Holland is no stranger to performing action on-screen — having played Spider-Man in six movies — the physical hardship he endured in Uncharted, the highly-anticipated, long-gestating adaptation of the Indiana Jones-esque video game series of the same name, still took some getting used to.
In Uncharted, Holland plays Nathan Drake, a street-smart thief by day (is there another kind?) and bartender by night, who’s enlisted by Mark Wahlberg’s seasoned scavenger Victor ‘Sully’ Sullivan to recover loot from a 500-year-old shipwreck.
“There are obviously a lot of similarities, the workload is pretty similar,” Holland, 25, tells 8days.sg over Zoom from London, fresh from the US$1 billion (S$1.34 bil)-plus success of Spider-Man: No Way Home. “But rather than wearing spandex every day, I was wearing a Hanley, which is quite a nice change of pace.”
What was toilsome was replicating the cinematically heart-in-mouth virtual action sequences that made the original games — starting with 2007’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune — such a hit.
“The video games set the bar so high with the action that we felt we had to deliver on the same scale,” says director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) in the production notes. “I love seeing the actor’s faces in the middle of the action, so that you can see it’s really them and they’re really in that place doing this. We pushed ourselves to meet that level, and credit goes to Tom Holland, who put his body on the line to achieve it.”
Elsewhere, Wahlberg, 50, who was once attached to play Nathan with his Three Kings director David O Russell at the helm, was more than happy to step into the shoes of the elder statesman and let his younger co-star do most of the heavy-lifting.
Speaking to 8days.sg in a separate Zoom interview, Wahlberg says, “I’m kinda getting older and transitioning into older parts, I thought it will be a lot more fun and believable than me trying to be Nathan Drake in his 20s.”
Even though Wahlberg had a relatively laidback role, Holland still found it intimidating to appear side by side with him: the Transformers: Age of Extinction star was really jacked, so much so that Holland felt the need to hit the gym and put on a few pounds of muscle.
He says, “Working with Mark Wahlberg who is in such a crazy, crazy shape, I really looked like his 12-year-old son at some point.”
