Warning: This article contains spoilers about Play Dirty.
“Jesus Christ, you shot Mark Cuban!”
Play Dirty didn’t pull any punches by killing off its major celebrity cameo halfway through the movie. Director Shane Black‘s comedic action heist film based on Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels brought in the Shark Tank star for one shocking and hilarious scene in which Mark Wahlberg‘s titular legendary thief kills the billionaire, in the middle of a packed restaurant, without any remorse.
Adding insult to injury? When Cuban’s dinner date shouts the above quote, Parker blandly replies, “Never heard of him.” Ouch.
While Parker’s irreverent attitude is offensive (and fatal!) to Cuban in the film, Play Dirty‘s director and star couldn’t be more gracious to the real-life billionaire for agreeing to cameo as himself in the movie, only to die 10 seconds later.
“You wouldn’t expect someone like that to go, ‘Oh yeah, sure,'” Black tells Entertainment Weekly. “But he was like, ‘I’m in.'”
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Mark Cuban in ‘Play Dirty’
While the filmmaker didn’t personally know Cuban before this cameo came about, another producer on the movie “had a connection” to the shark, who was “receptive” to the idea of playing himself and dying onscreen.
“Somehow he could at least get through to Mark Cuban, and so he put us in touch and arranged for that to happen,” Black reveals. “It just seemed like a really, really good, fun choice, because everyone knows who Mark Cuban is. There was even a scene we cut from the movie for time where there’s a guy talking about, ‘It’s a shame about Mark. I loved his show.’ And people are talking about the fact he’s just dead and gone. So I thought that was fun.”
However, pulling off Cuban’s appearance took some major movie magic. Wahlberg tells EW that he never actually filmed with the billionaire … at all.
“Mark Cuban wasn’t there on the day,” Wahlberg says. “We basically shot everything and then they shot his coverage later on down the road.”
The actor laughs at how he did know Cuban personally, and so he doubted that they would actually get the billionaire to film the planned cameo.
“I really was like, ‘Is Mark really going to be willing to do this?'” Wahlberg says. “And then when I saw the movie, I was like, ‘Holy s—, they actually got him to do it.’ I thought we’d be doing ADR and putting somebody else’s name in there.”
The director later tells EW that “it was always going to be Mark Cuban” in the scene, despite the tricky scheduling it took to get him to film.
“We were in Australia and Mark Cuban was in the U.S. so we shot half of the scene against a green screen with an empty chair and then a [body] double,” Black says. “And then when we came back here, here comes the chair and the table and the green screen, and here comes Mark Cuban. So it’s just a composite, but it works flawlessly.”
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Wahlberg “can’t wait” to finally see Cuban in person to thank him for filming his cameo.
“He’s such a great sport for doing that,” the actor adds. “And he’s also, oddly enough, written in the next movie that I’m about to start shooting now.” Wahlberg is quick to clarify, “Not the same outcome for him, but yes, him playing himself again. So I’m optimistic this time that he’ll actually be there when we do it together.”
Play Dirty is now streaming on Prime Video.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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