Arthur the King puts its ensemble through authentic adventure racing hurdles. Inspired by the real-life story of Mikael Lindnord, an adventure racer that found his canine companion on one of his competitions, Arthur the King takes Mark Wahlberg, Simu Liu, Nathalie Emmanuel and Ali Suliman to the Dominican Republic to endure a relentless 435-mile journey to the finish line. In order to get to that point, Michael (Wahlberg) leads his team by way of jogging through forests, biking through mountains, and even ziplining over treetops. That zipline sequence in particular isn’t a particularly smooth ride, as multiple members of the team end up stuck halfway across the wire and are consequently suspended 500 feet above the ground.
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When asked how shooting this scene compared to other tense moments in her acting career (being chased by a wrecking ball bomb in Fast X, standing before Cersei and The Mountain in Game of Thrones), Emmanuel noted that Arthur the King‘s zipline sequence takes the top spot.
“Straight up the ziplining because that was real,” Emmanuel began. “I went over a zipline over a very, very high canyon. The bomb in Fast X, I’m sorry to kill the illusion, was not real. The wall in Game of Thrones actually was a platform that wasn’t that high up. I actually really felt the adrenaline of going down a zipline. That is number one.”
While Arthur the King captured a legitimate sense of tension from Emmanuel, she added that she felt strong emotions during that Game of Thrones scene due to it wrapping up her longest-running character.
“Second maybe is Game of Thrones, because obviously that was emotional in a way,” Emmanuel continued. “That was the end of a character I’d played for seven years. It was a very high emotional adrenaline day just by shooting what we were shooting. Then Fast X, even though that has probably the most kind of like it does the most damage on screen, I didn’t really get to feel the adrenaline of that in the same way. They really put us into the real life situations in Arthur the King.”
Arthur the King is now in theaters.
