It's part of an actor's job to squeeze seamlessly into a role, but sometimes that job also requires
squeezing into a tight pair of shorts - after gaining 40 pounds.
Whether they were gaining weight, losing it, or just wreaking havoc on their bodies, these
actors and actresses went to some pretty extreme lengths to bring their characters to life.
Matt Damon
When Matt Damon signed on for The Informant!, he literally bit off more than he could chew.
The movie told the story of Mark Whitacre, a whistle-blower with some secrets of his
own.
While Whitacre was informing the FBI about his boss' price-fixing schemes, he was simultaneously
embezzling millions of dollars from the company.
To achieve the proper look, Damon gained 30 pounds, and he did so the old fashioned way
- by eating everything in sight.
The actor specifically name-dropped Doritos, McDonald's, and beer while doing press for
the movie.
When filming wrapped, Damon struggled to shed the weight because, apparently, even actors
are human.
He eventually took up boxing to rediscover that classic Matt Damon action hero look.
Christian Bale
Christian Bale loves pushing his body to the limit for his roles.
When he did The Machinist, he dropped 60 pounds and looked like a human skeleton.
He followed that by packing on the muscle for Batman Begins.
For his role in American Hustle, Bale gained 43 pounds and gave himself a comb-over.
He's not actually bald, so he purposefully shaved parts of his head to help sell his
aged hairstyle.
He basically transformed himself from a badass superhero to a sleazy con artist.
"I'm like the Vietcong, man.
I'm in and I'm out, I was there the whole time, you don't know it."
Charlize Theron
Charlize Theron is a stunningly beautiful actress, but when she was cast to play Aileen
Wuornos, those model looks were not going to cut it.
The movie, Monster, portrayed the story of Wuornos' killing spree between 1989 and 1990.
Theron was unrecognizable in her Oscar-winning role, gaining 30 pounds and shaving her eyebrows.
She reportedly gained the weight with a steady diet of donuts and potato chips.
"So basically you ate potato chips all the time?"
"Basically, everywhere.
I had a bag in my car, a bag in the bathroom, a bag in the kitchen."
That might sound like a once-in-a-lifetime commitment, but she did it again in 2018,
gaining almost 50 pounds for her role in Tully.
Rob McElhenney
It can be hard to keep a comedy feeling fresh after several seasons, but Rob McElhenney
came up with a unique solution.
For the seventh season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the actor purposely gained
50 pounds.
"Mack, you have gained, I mean, 50 pounds of fat."
"Mass."
"Fat!"
"Muscle."
"Let's be clear: fat!"
A lot of comedies will have actors donning fat suits for an episode or two to get some
cheap laughs out of it, but that wasn't the motivation behind this stunt.
McElhenney said the inspiration for the "fat Mac" story arc was that it was the opposite
of what typically happens on sitcoms.
"As a man who works very hard to maintain a certain level of physical excellence, I
find shortcuts insulting.
Now give me a piece of the ham, now!"
Since It's Always Sunny is supposed to be a deconstruction of typical sitcoms, Mac decided
to look less like the stereotypical movie star as the years went by.
McElhenney eventually lost the weight, but Fat Mac will live in our hearts forever.
"Uh, yeah, no one ever really knows what's going on with Mac.
He's fat, he's skinny, he's muscular.
It's really a cry for help and attention I think."
Ryan Gosling
While most actors who put on weight for a role get rewarded for their effort, things
didn't work out that way for Ryan Gosling.
In 2009, Peter Jackson released The Lovely Bones, a supernatural story about a murdered
young girl.
The story focuses on her ghost, and is split between her entrance into the afterlife and
her family trying to deal with her death.
The movie stars Mark Wahlberg as the girl's father, but Ryan Gosling was originally cast
in the role.
When Gosling was hired, he reportedly decided the father should be overweight, so he gained
a whopping 60 pounds for the role.
Unfortunately, he never ran this idea by Jackson, who didn't take to the inflated Gosling and
dropped him from the film.
"I just showed up on set, and I'd gotten it wrong.
And then I was fat and unemployed."
Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway's portrayal of poverty-stricken prostitute Fantinein the 2012 adaptation of
the novel Les Misérables may have earned her an Academy Award, but it also took a huge
toll on her health.
The actress had previously described her regimen in the run up to shooting the musical as,
quote, "starvation."
She finally elaborated on the extent of her dramatic weight loss in an interview, admitting
that she had to shed 25 pounds to be convincing as her character.
​Mila Kunis
Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky decided that Mila Kunis would be the perfect frenemy
for leading lady Natalie Portman after seeing Kunis in the rom-com Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
In order to fit the bill of tiny dancer Lily, Kunis had to slim down to the size of your
average ballerina, and that started with three months of solid training.
When that wasn't enough to reach her size-zero target, the actress took to some unhealthy
methods.
She told Howard Stern's SiriusXM show:
"I had to look skinny in order to look like a ballerina.
You fake it.
So, the best way to fake it is to unfortunately look like it…
And I'll tell you this, I'm not promoting this at all, but I used to be a smoker, and
so I smoked a lot of cigarettes and I ate a limited amount of calories."
Kunis revealed that she kept her intake at a shocking 1200 calories per day, and by the
end of the shoot, she tipped the scale at just 95 pounds, describing herself as "crazy
thin."
​Natalie Portman
Kunis' transformation for Black Swan was indeed a shocking one, though it wasn't quite as
shocking as the weight loss her co-star went through for the movie.
Count Natalie Portman among the actresses awarded with an Oscar for abusing their bodies
in the name of art.
Portman called her training for the psychological thriller the hardest thing she has ever experienced,
revealing that she was working 16 hour days while barely eating.
She said: "I was almost method acting without intending to.
I do wonder now how people can do this kind of role when they have a family."
Portman's frail figure started to become a concern for director Darren Aronofsky, who
later told Access Hollywood about the moment he had to say enough was enough.
"At a certain point I looked at [Portman's] back and she was so skinny and so cut.
I was like, 'Natalie, start eating!'
I made sure she had a bunch of food in her trailer."
Portman managed to maintain her frighteningly thin frame for the duration of the shoot,
though the second it was over her first thoughts were "pasta, pasta, pasta!"