Photo: Backgrid1/17Christian Bale
Christian Bale is known for putting on and shedding weight for several roles, most recently for the Dick Cheney biopic Backseat, for which he also shaved his head. The upcoming movie is directed by The Big Short director Adam McKay and Steve Carell will play Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The prep to play the Bush-era VP is decidedly less grueling that when he famously lost 65 pounds for 2004’s The Machinist: He told Variety that, to bulk up, “I’ve just been eating a lot of pies.”
Photo: Courtesy of NEON2/17Margot Robbie
Robbie stunned viewers with her transformation in 2017 into disgraced professional ice-skater Tonya Harding for I, Tonya. Not only were makeup, some prosthetics, and some very ’80s wigs used to make the blonde Australian bombshell appear more like Harding; Robbie trained for five months, five days a week, four hours a day on the ice rink learning to ice-skate before filming. She did get a herniated disk in her neck from her training; her next feat will be to age by about three decades for her role in Mary Queen of Scots.
Photo: Everett3/17Robert Pattinson
Somehow heartthrob Robert Pattinson was able to go unnoticed while working at a car wash and taking the New York City subway while preparing for his critically acclaimed role in the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, as a would-be thief. He also “literally lived in the same basement apartment [as the character] in Harlem. I never opened my curtains, didn’t change the sheets the entire time I was there, for those two months, and I would just sleep in my clothes.”
Photo: Everett4/17John Krasinski
The beloved Office actor transformed into a cut special ops soldier for 13 Hours, about the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya. Krasinski told Yahoo! News that he and the other actors went through vigorous training from former Navy SEALS: “We learned how to fire a whole variety of different weapons and learned how to maneuver through rooms with lights, without lights. We learned how to maneuver through buildings on fire . . . we did all that sort of training. Physically, it was an extremely intense workout.”
Photo: Courtesy of 20th Century Fox Film5/17Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio’s grizzly turn in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant may have brought him one step closer to Oscar gold, but it nearly killed the actor in the process. “I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do,” DiCaprio has said. “Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly.” In a cover story for Wired, the actor remarked, “If a cat has nine lives, I think I’ve used a few.” You know what they say, Leo: “You learn to take life as it comes at you . . . to make each day count.” Here’s to that Oscar!
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Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros.6/17Chris Hemsworth
After filming Ron Howard’s whaling epic, In the Heart of the Sea, Chris Hemsworth was a shell of his former hammer-wielding self. Last month, the Thor star tweeted out a photo to show just how much the 500-calorie-a-day diet changed his appearance. “Just tried a new diet/training program called Lost at Sea,” he wrote. “Wouldn’t recommend it.” Hemsworth spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the difficulty of the extreme dietary restrictions. “When you’re already starting off lean, it’s brutal to chew through that kind of weight. Every pound feels like a kilogram,” he said. “We kind of went insane, weighing ourselves every day. We all felt like a bunch of supermodels, trying to get down in weight for a show or something,” Hemsworth added. “That’s all we spoke about. You’ve got 15 burly blokes on the sea and all we talked about was our diet and who’d lost more weight and who’s looking really skinny. It’s ridiculous!”
Photo: Everett Collection7/17Shia LeBeouf, Fury
For his role in 2014’s Fury, LeBeouf was as committed as could be. He told Dazed: “ David (Ayer, director) 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. I was baptized—accepted Christ in my heart—tattooed my surrender and became a chaplain’s assistant to Captain Yates for the 41st Infantry. I spent a month living on a forward operating base. Then I linked up with my cast and went to Fort Irwin. I pulled my tooth out, knifed my face up, and spent days watching horses die. I didn’t bathe for four months.”
Photo: Everett Collection8/17Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot
The three-time Oscar winner is famous for his method acting. For The Last Of The Mohicans, he built canoes; for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he taught himself Czech. Most famously, however, in 1989’s My Left Foot, in which he played an Irishman with cerebral palsy, Lewis did not leave his character’s wheelchair, and crew members were required to spoon-feed him. He also adopted his character’s slumped posture, which eventually caused two of his ribs to break.
Photo: Everett Collection9/17Jamie Foxx, Ray
In addition to shedding 30 pounds for his titular role in the 2004 Ray Charles biopic, Foxx committed to his character’s blindness by wearing prosthetic eyelids. During the first two weeks of filming, Foxx suffered panic attacks from the prosthetics. “Imagine having your eyes glued shut for fourteen hours a day,” Foxx said. “That's your jail sentence.”
Photo: Everett Collection10/17Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver
De Niro reportedly worked twelve-hour cabbie shifts for a month to prepare for his iconic role. Legend has it, the actor would pick up passengers while on filming breaks in New York City.
Photo: Everett Collection11/17Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
In order to prepare for his turn as the deranged Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the actor went to pretty extreme lengths. “I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices—it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh.”
Photo: Everett Collection12/17Adrien Brody in The Pianist
For his Oscar-winning role, Brody worked to inhabit the life of Holocaust survivor and real-life concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. “I gave up my apartment, I sold my car, I disconnected the phones, and I left,” he said. “I took two bags and my keyboard and moved to Europe.”
Photo: Everett Collection13/17Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Portman spent eight hours a day in rehearsals and lost twenty pounds for her role as the perfection-seeking ballerina in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. The punishing schedule and diet took its toll on the actress, who dislocated a rib during rehearsals. "There were some nights that I thought I literally was going to die."
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Photo: Everett Collection14/17Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables
For the screen adaptation of Les Misérables, Hathaway lost 25 pounds for her role of Fantine and had a difficult time transitioning out of her character’s state of deprivation. “I had to be obsessive about it—the idea was to look near death. Looking back on the whole experience—and I don’t judge it in any way—it was definitely a little nuts. It was definitely a break with reality . . . ”
Photo: Everett Collection15/17Charlize Theron, Monster
Theron went to extreme measures for her transformation into serial killer Aileen Wuornos for 2003’s Monster. She wore dentures, had her skin layered with tattoo ink, shaved her eyebrows, and had her hair thinned and fried repeatedly.
Photo: Everett Collection16/17Demi Moore, GI Jane
In addition to shaving her head, Moore prepared for her role of Jordan O’Neil in GI Jane by participating in grueling trainings lead by former Navy SEALS. “I could have come in and asked to let the stuntwoman do the obstacle course,” Moore said. “But I felt I would have walked away having missed an opportunity experiencing, first-hand, what these people actually go through in training; it's the whole reason for doing this film in the first place.”
Photo: Everett Collection17/17Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Director David Fincher, Mara, and makeup artist Pat McGrath spent two days coming up with 26 looks for Mara’s role of Lisbeth Salander. In addition to her chopped-up, dyed-black hair, and bleached eyebrows, Mara got all of her character’s piercings, including a nipple piercing. “Because of all the tattoos and the makeup and the piercings, and the physical transformations my body has to go through, it would always feel sort of like I was in costume, even if I was naked,” Mara said. “It just felt like a good one to get—a necessary one to get."
