Mark Wahlberg's about to show up in the latest Transformers film, but earlier in his career he was responsible for remaking the original Planet of the Apes movie. Unfortunately, the movie wasn't all that well-received critically, and filming it had another drawback: Mark Wahlberg constantly got punched in the balls. He said of the experience filming the Tim Burton film:
The monkeys, no, they were the worst, they would attack me. Because Helena Bonham Carter and I had this relationship, so I had to work with the monkey as the astronaut and they wanted us to get acclimated with the chimps, and anytime I would go near her, the chimps would start attacking me. They'd start trying to punch me in the nuts, like my 5-year-old son, like really bad, like nonstop. Like OK, stop now, stop playing around--I gotta work! The chimps were constantly trying to attack me.
Although a lot of the apes in the 2001 movie were just humans in a ton of makeup, there were some live chimps on the set of the movie, as Mark Wahlberg's character had a chimp named Pericles who really kicked off the events at the start of the film. As Mark Wahlberg told the audience on The Graham Norton Show, the experience of filming 2001's Planet of the Apes was often painful, and not only would the chimps not want to cooperate, they weren't particularly pumped about letting him anywhere near his co-star, either. Overall the movie doesn't seem to have been the best experience for Wahlberg. Although he didn't outright say the film was awful, he did take a few other digs at the flick during his appearance on the talk show.
Of course, in the days since Planet of the Apes came out, motion capture and animation have gotten a whole lot better. When the franchise was rebooted with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, Andy Serkis and other actors signed on to play the apes characters. Serkis in particular has been acclaimed for the motion capture and portrayal of Caesar, one of the lead apes in the rebellion during each of the reboot films. He was also on the Graham Norton show over the weekend and showed off his impressive ability to walk like different types of apes, which you can take a look at below.
Still, back in 2005, motion capture wasn't really the best option. Movies like Planet of the Apes sometimes employed live animals, and according to Mark Wahlberg, those scenes did not go particularly well. Now, Wahlberg has moved on to Transformers: The Last Knight, which employs plenty of CGI and will be out on June 21. And the motion capture-oriented third movie in the Apes franchise, War For the Planet of the Apes, will be out on July 14. Take a look at what else is coming up with our summer schedule.
