17 Stars Who Went to Extreme Lengths for Movie Roles
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!
