For some actors, staying in character even after the director yells "cut" can have interesting
real-world consequences. When they lose themselves inside a character, it can make for some jaw-dropping
performances, and some shocking behind-the-scenes tales.
While method acting began as a way to harness personal experiences and emotions in order
to play a part more convincingly, in recent years it's become almost synonymous with drastic
physical transformations. In one prominent example, Christian Bale made headlines and
jeopardized his health when he lost a jaw-dropping 63 pounds to play the insomnia-plagued Trevor
Reznik in 2004's The Machinist. For weeks before filming began, Bale survived on just
an apple and a can of tuna a day. He used a photo of an emaciated Hank Williams, taken
three months before the musician's death, as his inspiration.
"Are you okay?"
"Don't I look okay?"
"If you were any thinner, you wouldn't exist."
According to costar Michael Ironside, the drastic diet wasn't even necessary. The screenwriter
for the movie had put some example weights into the script based on his own height. When
the much-taller Bale saw the figures, he decided to go for those instead of something more
realistic for his larger frame. Ironside explained:
"Those weights he writes on the bathroom wall in the film are his actual weights in the
film."
After filming wrapped, Bale bulked up again, gaining 109 pounds in just six months for
his next role in Batman Begins.
In the 1980s, Val Kilmer had made something of a name for himself with his roles in Top
Gun and Willow, but he hadn't really had a chance yet to show off his Juilliard training
with a weightier role. That all changed when Kilmer was cast to play singer Jim Morrison
in the 1991 biopic The Doors. Before he even got the role, the actor spent thousands of
dollars to produce a music video of himself as Morrison in a bid to impress director Oliver
Stone.
After landing the part, Kilmer immersed himself in the role by reading Morrison's writings,
interrogating the Doors' longtime producer Paul Rothchild for hours, and spending time
in Morrison's old haunts around southern California. Kilmer learned to perform 50 songs so well
that even Morrison's bandmates were unable to tell who was singing when they heard the
recordings. Except for a handful of lines and one of Morrison's unearthly screams, Kilmer
sang every song in the film live.
"Doing the music was a pleasure, singing live for a live audience, and having them film
it, was satisfying."
He earned widespread praise for the role, but the actor claimed there was nothing supernatural
about his uncanny performance, explaining:
"It's just the blessing of acting. It's not possession, it's just a reminder of what we
all can do with our minds, if we are open, and willing, we can do anything."
By the time director Kimberly Peirce secured the funding to make Boys Don't Cry, she had
already spent three years desperately searching for the perfect person to play trans man Brandon
Teena, who was sexually assaulted and killed in 1993. After showing up to an audition in
her husband's clothes and convincing a security guard she was male, the relatively unknown
Hilary Swank was cast as Brandon, beating out more than 100 others.
"So I wore my husband's clothes, I strapped and packed, that's what I call it, strapping
my breasts and putting a sock in my pants."
Swank had to undergo both a physical and psychological transformation for the role. For weeks, she
lived as a trans man both on and off the set: she lost weight to bring out the angle of
her jaw and cheekbones, cut her hair short, bound her breasts, and packed her pants with
a rolled-up sock. She practiced the lower register of her voice, and immersed herself
in Teena's life by reading court transcripts about Brandon and books about being transgendered.
Swank was frequently able to pass as male during this period, even fooling her neighbors.
At other times, some of the people she met seemed, quote, "threatened" by her androgynous
appearance. She explained:
"I didn't realize what it was like to be out in the world as someone that people can't
define. That's a really lonely place."
For Swank, playing Brandon was a personally transformative experience. She concluded:
"I was afforded this amazing opportunity to stretch myself as an artist, and it just happened
to stretch me as a human being."
The film certainly transformed Swank's budding career. She went on to win an Oscar and numerous
other accolades for impressive performance.
Actors are often praised when they go method for a movie role, but Jared Leto reportedly
went a bit overboard while playing the Joker in 2016's Suicide Squad. He was inspired by
his Joker predecessor Heath Ledger, who famously used method acting while playing the comic
book villain in 2008's The Dark Knight.
However, some of the creative choices Leto made on the Suicide Squad set were quite shocking,
to say the least. To get into the psychotic character, he had a "henchman" deliver a videotaped
message and a dead pig to the cast. He later gave costar Margot Robbie a live rat.
"I did get thank you notes for some of these gifts, mind you. I'm not gonna say who, or
what, or what specific gift was thanked."
Everyone on the shoot called him Joker, or Smiley, or Mr. J. He spent hours on YouTube,
watching footage of actual violent crimes being committed. Even writer/director David
Ayer was intimidated, explaining:
"You can feel it when he comes to work, the crew feels it, everyone feels it...He's f--ing
terrifying."
In the end, Suicide Squad, and Leto's performance, were met with extremely mixed reviews. In
an essay for The Atlantic, Angelica Jade Bastién argued that, quote, "Hollywood has ruined
method acting," and said:
"Jared Leto's turn in Suicide Squad is the latest reminder that the technique has become
more about ego and marketing than good performances."
Sylvester Stallone approached Rocky IV with all of the effort he could muster and the
desire to make the film's brutal boxing scenes between Rocky Balboa and Soviet fighter Ivan
Drago feel as real as possible. So, naturally, Stallone and actor Dolph Lundgren went at
each other with all they had. Stallone told Ain't it Cool News:
"What you see in the first 20 seconds is real, and after the third take of taking body blows,
I felt a burning in my chest but ignored it. Later that night, I couldn't breathe very
well, and they took me to the emergency room."
After registering an extremely elevated blood pressure, Stallone was airlifted to another
hospital, where he spent eight days in intensive care. Apparently, Lundgren had hit him in
the chest with such force that Stallone's heart, quote, "slammed against [his] breastbone
and began to swell," and without medical intervention, it may have stopped completely. But at least
the fight between Rocky and Drago looks cool.
Who would've guessed that Shia LaBeouf, shaggy-headed child star of Holes and Even Stevens, would
grow up to become one of his generation's most boundary-pushing actors? Forever grappling
with the psychological ramifications of being an actor and the nature of fame, LaBeouf takes
his work seriously.
"It's religious, it's spiritual, it's transcendent."
And he went all in, mind, body, and soul, when preparing for his role as devoutly religious
tank gunner Boyd "Bible" Swan in David Ayer's World War II military film Fury. The actor
told Dazed:
"David told us right from the gate, 'I need you to give me everything.' So the day after
I got the job, I joined the U.S. National Guard."
He spent weeks living on a base, and he served as a chaplain's assistant. That helped LaBeouf
wrap his head around the character's faith, as did getting himself baptized, an event
he commemorated with a tattoo of a cross. For the more physical parts of the life of
a long-serving soldier, LaBeouf made himself extremely uncomfortable, saying:
"I pulled my tooth out, knifed my face up...I didn't bathe for four months."
Previously known as a comic actor for his work in such broad fare as In Living Color
and Booty Call, actor Jamie Foxx gave a revelatory performance as soul legend and musical innovator
Ray Charles in the 2004 biopic Ray. In order to play a man so iconic that he was nicknamed
"The Genius," Foxx had to take the transformative route in his preparation. First, the usually
fit Foxx lost 30 pounds to play the slighter Charles. Foxx fasted for a week, then worked
out daily while following a restrictive diet.
Then, in order to relate to how Charles, who was blind, interacted with the world, Ray
director Taylor Hackford requested that Foxx seal his eyes closed. The actor said okay,
and he was fitted with prosthetics that mimicked Charles' impaired eyelids. Not only could
Foxx not see at all, but it took him two weeks to get acclimated to the world of darkness,
which left him feeling claustrophobic and suffering from panic attacks. Foxx told The
New York Times:
"Imagine having your eyes glued shut for 14 hours a day."
"I'm not prepared to do my thing right now."
Be that as it may, portraying Ray Charles won Foxx an Academy Award.
Tom Hanks hasn't been shy about dramatically changing his body for a film role. He put
on 30 pounds to play sad sack baseball coach Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own, and
then he lost a couple dozen pounds to play HIV-positive lawyer Andrew Beckett in Philadelphia.
But the 2000 drama Cast Away required his most audacious body morph to date.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Cast Away tells the story of Chuck Noland, a FedEx employee
from Memphis who, after a plane crash, finds himself stranded on an island for years, struggling
to survive with very little food at the ready. At the beginning of the film, Chuck is slightly
overweight, and then he wastes away during his tropical isolation.
That's something that couldn't or wouldn't be faked. Hanks lost over 50 pounds to play
Chuck, and Cast Away shot around Hanks' rigorous weight-loss plan. Zemeckis filmed the first
part of the movie, then shut the production for a year in order for Hanks to lose the
weight, grow a beard, and develop a deep island-style tan.
Hanks was rewarded for his efforts by his peers, as he received an Academy Award nomination
for Cast Away, but he believes the weight fluctuations contributed to his developing
type 2 diabetes.
When it came time to prepare for his role in Dallas Buyers Club as the HIV-positive
Ron Woodruff, Matthew McConaughey sought out the wisdom of a master to find out how to
lose weight to portray an emaciated character: Tom Hanks. McConaughey told People:
"I actually called Tom and had a great conversation with him about what he learned about losing
weight for Philadelphia and Cast Away."
He took some of that advice, along with the assistance of a nutritionist, and shrunk from
185 pounds, going right past his goal of 145 and landing at 135.
"But what were you eating, honestly?"
"Five ounces of fish, couple vegetables twice a day."
"Uh-huh."
"Some pudding in the morning and as much red wine as I liked at night."
McConaughey told Radio Times that around that time he started losing his eyesight. His character
had to be pale, so the actor also refrained from going outside for six months.
While rapid weight loss and sunlight deprivation may weaken the body, McConaughey explained
that the energy moved somewhere else, saying:
"All the acuity, energy and power I lost from the neck down transferred to the neck up."
He might be right, because he won an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club.
Darren Aronofsky's 2010 movie Black Swan is an absolutely harrowing psychological drama
set in the high-stakes, highly competitive world of professional ballet. Natalie Portman
plays dancer Nina Sayers, whose mind slowly unravels while preparing to play the pivotal
role of the Swan Queen in a production of the classic Tchaikovsky [cha-KOFF-skee] ballet
Swan Lake.
Top-level dance is as hard on the body as Swan Lake was for Nina Sayers' sanity, and
Portman was fully committed to doing whatever it took to flesh out her character. The already
slight actress lost 20 pounds to play a ballerina, sticking to a diet of primarily carrots and
almonds. That didn't provide much fuel for the eight hours of ballet training and prep
Portman endured daily in pre-production. The actress told Entertainment Weekly:
"There were some nights that I thought I literally was going to die. It was the first time I
understood how you could get so wrapped up in a role that it could sort of take you down."
Portman starved herself, put her body through ballet boot camp, and dislocated a rib for
Black Swan, but it may have been worth it: She won the Academy Award for her performance.
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