1.
Jamie Dornan once stalked a woman in order to prepare to play serial killer Paul Spector in The Fall. “This is a really bad reveal: I, like, followed a woman off the train one day to see what it felt like to pursue someone like that. I really kept my distance,” he revealed to the LA Times. “She got off a few stops earlier than I was planning, so I said right, I have to commit to this. I followed her around a couple of street corners and then was like: What are you doing?”
2.
Aaron Eckhart confirmed to Howard Stern that he once pretended to have lost a child so that he could attend a child loss support group in preparation for his role in Rabbit Hole. “It’s very sensitive to go in there, of course it is. I did the research. The gathering is very quiet. There’s 10 people, couples. [Their children had passed away] very recently, it’s fresh. You’re sitting in sort of a circle. Then one person goes, then two, three, then it gets to me. And by that point you’re just so flushed that you just start going and giving the details of the story.”
He said he “lost it” when he was speaking. “You really believe that you just lost a child. You are as close to reality in that sense as possible. I don’t want to be rude to people who have lost a child, but yeah, you feel right there, you feel like your character.”
3.
Ben Foster took performance-enhancing drugs to prepare to play the famous cyclist Lance Armstrong in The Program. “It isn’t something I’d recommend to fellow actors,” he said, declining to name the specific drug. “These are very serious chemicals and they affect your body in real ways. For my own investigation it was important for me privately to understand it.” However, he said it took him a long time to physically and mentally recover from taking the drugs.
4.
In preparation for Alpha Dog, Foster lived on the streets of Los Angeles, “pissing my pants like everyone else” so that he could prepare to play an unhoused veteran that gets addicted to crystal meth. He didn’t take crystal meth to prepare, but he implies he did take other drugs. “In all transparency, I rolled with those guys on Alpha Dog, and I bought their drugs, but you have to ask yourself how far you can go and still come back. I had been losing friends to crystal meth. The proximity to it was enough that I didn’t need to take that door,” he said. He also used eye drops for glaucoma to give his eyes the look of someone addicted to meth.
5.
One last Ben Foster example — he literally ate handfuls of dirt to prepare for his role in Lone Survivor. “You put yourself in a headspace, I suppose, like [American] footballers headbutt each other to stay in the game. As actors you find moments to keep in line with what the day is demanding,” Foster said when asked about his actions. “I don’t know. I might have been trying to help out the makeup department, or I might have just wanted to eat some dirt. It’s not like I wake up in the morning and be like, ‘You know what I’m going to do today is just eat handfuls of dirt.’ But…you do as it feels.” For the film, the actors all had to attend a month-long boot camp with real Navy Seals and, according to Foster, “simulate[d] operations with live fire.”
6.
Don Cheadle said he sold drugs so that he could understand his character in Brooklyn’s Finest, though he may have been joking. “When I knew I had the role, I went down to the local pharmaceutical distributor, got a packet, and started slinging drugs. I’d never done it before. I’m a method actor; I had to understand it from the ground up,” Cheadle told Blackfilm. However, he “decided being an actor was better than selling drugs.”
7.
Shia LaBeouf reportedly took acid to prepare for his role in The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman — and then was actually on acid while filming some scenes where his character is on acid. “There’s a way to do an acid trip like Harold & Kumar, and there’s a way to be on acid,” he said. “What I know of acting, Sean Penn actually strapped up to that (electric) chair in Dead Man Walking. These are the guys that I look up to.”
8.
He also had a tooth pulled out for his role in Fury. After Los Angeles dentists refused to help him, he says, he “got it done by some guy in Reseda next to a Radio Shack, and he didn’t ask too many questions.” Costar Logan Lerman revealed LaBeouf also cut his own face right in front of him and kept opening the cuts for the film. Oh, and LaBeouf refused to shower, according to one source, who stated Shia was trying to “better understand how his character would have felt living in the trenches.”
9.
To prepare for his role in Good Time, Robert Pattinson essentially went undercover in New York. He got a job at a car wash — though he only lasted a day — went out in character and took the subway. He also lived in the same apartment as his character in the film — a basement apartment 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,” he revealed.
“There was this woman who lived upstairs, and she kept trying to see what was going on because she thought I was such a weirdo. I kept really weird hours, and I would run in and quickly close the curtains. I was like this freak living in the bottom of the basement,” Pattinson continued. “I was by myself the whole time. I only ate cans of tuna the whole time. I probably have mercury poisoning now because I ate it just out of the can. That’s all that was there: tuna, hot sauce, and Nespresso capsules.”
10.
Benedict Cumberbatch lived in Montana for two months to prepare for his role in The Power of the Dog, learning how to herd cows and castrate a bull (among other things) so that he could convincingly play a rancher. He also didn’t want to break character during filming, so he initially refused to bathe as he was rehearsing for the film. He gave that up by the time filming started, but he did decline to have his clothes washed because they helped him stay in character. He was also rude to costars while behaving in character between takes, once upsetting Jesse Plemons by calling him “big boy.”
11.
Ryan Gosling did a littleeee too much preparation for the role of George Harvey in The Lovely Bones, and it ended up costing him the role. After he was cast, he started drinking melted ice cream and gained 60 pounds because he “really believed [the character] should be 210 pounds.” However, he didn’t communicate this with director Peter Jackson, who “had a different idea of how the character should look.” When Gosling showed up on set to film, Jackson fired him. Stanley Tucci was cast in the role instead.
12.
On the other extreme, Christian Bale lost over 60 pounds preparing for his role in The Machinist by subsisting on a diet of cigarettes and whiskey, along with an apple and a single tin of tuna. He got down to 120 pounds and wanted to keep going to under 100 pounds — producers for the film actually had to stop him because they worried it might seriously jeopardize his health.
13.
Similarly, to prepare for his role in The Pianist, Adrien Brody lost 30 pounds by essentially nearly starving himself and “barely drinking water.” He also left his girlfriend, gave up his apartment, sold his car, disconnected his phones, and moved to Europe with two bags and a keyboard, then spent months preparing by practicing piano four hours a day, selling all of his belongings, and reading Szpilman’s memoirs to immerse himself in the Holocaust.
14.
This wasn’t the only time Brody committed this hard to a role. For The Jacket, he actually asked to be left alone in a room in a straightjacket so he could understand how it would feel for his character.
15.
Oh, and he really got real braces for Oxygen, saying, “I didn’t know how fucking painful that was until they stuck in pliers and ripped them off my teeth at the end.”
16.
Matthew McConaughey also had to lose a ton of weight to play a man with AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club — over 50 pounds. In fact, he ate so little that he actually started to go blind. McConaughey originally refuted this but later acknowledged, “When I got down to where I lost 43 pounds, I did start losing my eyesight. I noticed it acutely, and it had to do with the weight loss.” Luckily, doctors were able to help, and his vision came back.
17.
Ashton Kutcher was so committed to playing the role of Steve Jobs in Jobs that he followed the Apple founder’s diet of “fruitarianism” — which is basically vegetarianism with an emphasis on fruits. Kutcher specifically started drinking carrot juice constantly, as Jobs had reportedly also done. At other times, he was eating nothing but grapes. This diet landed him the hospital with pancreatitis twice.
18.
Gary Oldman was similarly hospitalized after he ate only “steamed fish and lots of melon” to play Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy and ultimately lost 30 pounds to play the role.
19.
Lady Gaga says she lived as Patrizia Reggiani for a year and a half while preparing for and filming House of Gucci — and that she spoke with an Italian accent for nine months of that (even though filming only took a few months). Right from the start, she dyed her hair, feeling that she could not use the accent as a blonde. “I started to live in a way whereby anything that I looked at, anything that I touched, I started to take notice of where and when I could see money,” she also said, adding that she began learning and practicing “as an exercise” because she thought ‘finding her interests in life, that I would become a photographer.”
To prepare, Gaga also wrote an 80-page biography of Reggiani, carb-loaded with pasta and bread to gain weight for the role, and studied panthers to channel them in the role. And then, during filming, Gaga had to hire a psychiatric nurse on set because she kept dealing with vomiting and fatigue after channeling personal trauma into scenes.
20.
To prepare to play a trans man in Boys Don’t Cry, Hilary Swank lived as a man for four weeks. She bound her chest and packed a sock in her pants.
21.
To prepare to play Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos, Nicole Kidman began smoking cigarettes. “They decided Lucy needed to have a deep smoker’s voice, so I started smoking,” she revealed. Luckily, she was able to quickly give it up after production.
22.
Daniel Day-Lewis is particularly famous for his method acting and role preparation. For The Crucible, he lived on the uninhabited bird sanctuary island they were to film on. He even helped build his character’s home. “It seemed that the important thing to do was some kind of physical work,” Day-Lewis said. “So I spent some time on the island, because so much of the story of those people’s lives was contained within the way they took possession of that land.”
23.
He also lived in the North Carolina wilderness for months to prepare for The Last of the Mohicans, learning skills like tracking and skinning animals, building canoes, building canoes, and fighting with various weapons like tomahawks and a 12-pound flintlock that he could shoot while running (which he had on him at all times, even during his Christmas dinner). He only ate things he had killed himself – the director Michael Mann revealed, “If he didn’t shoot it, he didn’t eat it.”
24.
In an even more extreme example, to prepare to play a falsely accused man In the Name of the Father, Day-Lewis lived in a prison cell for two days (some reports suggest it was three) with no food or water; men would also knock on the door every 10 minutes so he could not sleep. He also had the crew verbally abuse him and throw cold water on him, and reportedly underwent nine hours of mock interrogation afterward.
He also lost 50 pounds for the role — and he spent weeks before filming speaking only in an Irish accent.
25.
He reportedly would go out and pick fights with strangers in Rome while filming Gangs of New York, and he became an apprentice butcher to learn how to cut meat. And while filming, Day-Lewis refused to wear a warmer coat because it wasn’t period-accurate and caught pneumonia — he then refused to be treated with modern medicine because it wouldn’t have existed in the 19th century.
26.
But perhaps his most infamous role preparation was for My Left Foot. He spent weeks in a wheelchair preparing to play a man with cerebral palsy, and he was spoon-fed to approximate his character’s experience eating. He also learned to paint and type with his foot, like his character did. Once on set, he remained in a wheelchair and sometimes had to be carried over set pieces and equipment. He spent so much time hunched in a wheelchair that he actually broke two ribs.
27.
Joaquin Phoenix — who is also known for his method acting — basically had his jaw wired partly shut to prepare for his character’s habit of speaking of the side of his mouth in The Master. “I actually went to my dentist and I had them fasten these metal brackets to my teeth on the top and the bottom, and then I wrapped rubber bands around it to force my jaw shut on one side,” Phoenix revealed. “After a couple weeks, the bands, they weren’t really strong enough to kind of hold it, so I ended up getting rid of the rubber bands, and I still had these metal brackets in, and so it made me constantly aware of my cheek. You know, they had these pointy tips so they’d tear up the cheek a little bit, so I just then was constantly aware of it.”
28.
Finally, Leonardo DiCaprio went hard in his preparation for The Revenant, eating raw liver to prepare for his character’s diet and even sleeping in an animal carcass. He spent a ton of time in the wilderness, and during the shoot, he endured “freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly,” going in and out of freezing rivers and camping in extremely low temperatures. His work paid off — DiCaprio finally won an Oscar for the role. But…was all that really necessary?
