Actors are known for sometimes going to extremes in order to prepare for a role. People like Heath Ledger, Hilary Swank, Robert De Niro, and Christian Bale have been acknowledged for their method acting in previous roles, and sometimes this extreme dedication becomes physical, too.
Certain actors have gone through extreme weight loss transformations to prepare for a role. And oftentimes, the lengths they go to are unhealthy and borderline dangerous.
Continue reading to learn about some of the most extreme ways actors have lost weight for a role while keeping in mind that no one should try these diets in any capacity.
And for more celeb news, read 8 Best Healthy Snacks That Celebs Love.
Kunis played a ballerina in the eerie 2010 film “Black Swan,” and to fit the ballerina persona, Kunis decided to lose weight for the role. However, Kunis shared on Sirius XM that she lost an unhealthy amount of weight and wouldn’t recommend anyone do what she did for the film.
“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 shares. “Twelve hundred calories and I smoked…I don’t advocate this at all. It was awful.”
Sign up for our newsletter!
Hathaway lost a total of 25 pounds for her role as Fantine in “Les Miserables.” While she was celebrated and acknowledged for her tremendous performance in the film, the star underwent a dangerously unhealthy diet for this weight loss.
According to Vogue, Hathaway ate only two pieces of oatmeal paste a day to drop the weight. “I had to be obsessive about it—the idea was to look near death,” she tells Vogue.
Bale may be one of the most extreme actors when it comes to transforming his body for a role. He’s both lost weight and gained weight for films, but the body transformation that has grabbed audiences the most is his 55-pound weight loss for “The Machinist:” a film about a man grappling with insomnia.
To lose the weight, Bale drank black coffee and ate one can of tuna with one apple every day. While this extreme weight loss worked, it’s no surprise that something like this can wreak havoc on a person’s health. In fact, Bale now admits that his past methods of transforming for a role have to stop. He told The Sunday Times in 2019 that “I can’t keep doing it. I really can’t. My mortality is staring me in the face.”
In 2015, Zoe Kravitz played the role of someone who is bulimic and anorexic for a film called “The Road Within.” The star had to lose weight for the role, which she did with an extreme cleanse.
“I did a cleanse,” she said in an interview with Us Weekly. “I tried to do it the healthiest way as possible, even though it’s not healthy to do. I ended up drinking clay, because it cleans out your body and fills you up. I was eating like a Mason jar of pureed vegetables a day and running.”
McConaughey lost 50 pounds for the 2013 film “Dallas Buyers Club,” where he played a man with HIV/AIDS in the 80s. In order to go from 188 pounds to 135 in just five months, McConaughey adopted a strange diet of fish, veggies, egg whites, and tapioca pudding.
“I found tapioca pudding, and I found the tiniest little antique spoon in New Orleans, a little-bitty sugar spoon, and I would eat it with that so it would last longer,” says McConaughey.
