The Most Intense Sacrifices Actors Made For A Role

All acting involves transformation of some kind. To play a role, actors assume emotions, physical activities, and even appearances that are often different from their own. Some of these transformations are extreme: Method actors like Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis and Jared Leto are almost legendary for risking their health via considerable weight gain or loss, remaining in character for the duration of a shoot, and even more extreme measures (like Day-Lewis refusing to bathe while making the period drama "The Crucible"). 

While these actors remain the high-water mark for sacrificing personal comfort to give an honest portrayal, other performers have taken similar approaches to challenging roles. Following is a list of actors who pushed their bodies and spirits to their limits for a movie role, and while their efforts often paid off with critical praise and awards, they also faced serious physical and mental health issues as a result of their sacrifices.

Actor Cillian Murphy is front and center in nearly every scene in Christopher Nolan's sprawling, three-hour-plus biopic "Oppenheimer" — a daunting challenge for any performer. But Murphy's co-star, Robert Downey, Jr., said that the actor, who won an Oscar as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, was not only up to the task, but put himself through a demanding regime to maintain authenticity.

Speaking to People, Downey – who also won an Oscar for "Oppenheimer" – said of Murphy, "He knew that ["Oppenheimer"] was going to be a behemoth when Chris asked him. But I think he also had the humility that is required to survive playing a role like that." To illustrate his point, Downey said, "We'd be like, 'Hey, we got a three-day weekend. Maybe we'll go antiquing in Santa Fe. What are you going to do?' 'Oh, I have to learn 30,000 words of Dutch. Have a nice time.' But that's the nature of the ask."

Emily Blunt, who played Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, said that Murphy was equally rigorous in maintaining an extreme diet to match the real Oppenheimer's slim build. "He had such a monumental undertaking," she told People. "And he could only eat, like, an almond a day. He was so emaciated." Of his diet during filming, Murphy told IndieWire, "I don't advise it."

Like De Niro, Day-Lewis, and Jared Leto, Christian Bale has set the bar for modifying his body for roles in extreme ways. He famously gained and/or lost weight for several roles, including Gorr the God Butcher in "Thor: Love and Thunder" and former Vice President Dick Cheney in "Vice," but his most extraordinary transformation came in the 2005 thriller "The Machinist." To play a deeply troubled factory worker, Bale dropped more than 60 pounds over a period of four months through a diet of black coffee and an apple and can of tuna per day.

Health expert Daniel O'Shaughnessy told Esquire UK that Bale's diet, which amounted to about 200 calories a day, posed health risks: "An extreme diet like this will play havoc with your metabolism and cause a lot of stress on your body." According to his "Machinist" co-star, cult legend Michael Ironside, Bale wasn't required to drop the weight; the character had been envisioned by the film's writer, Scott Kosar, as much smaller than the 6-foot-tall Bale. 

"The writer is only about five-foot-six, and he put his own weights in," Ironside told HuffPost Live. "And then Chris did the film and Chris said, 'No, don't change the weights. I want to see if I can make them. So those weights he writes on the bathroom wall in the film are his actual weights."

Extreme sacrifices for roles seem to be linked inexorably to Nicolas Cage. The Oscar winner has, at various times, worn bizarre tribal makeup, devoured live cockroaches, and gotten blackout drunk on camera to dive deeply into his characters. For better or worse, this full-body investment in his roles is part of Cage's reputation and legend, so to speak. Though the cockroach consumption (for the film "Vampire's Kiss") is pretty extreme, it doesn't quite match the level of commitment he gave to one of his earliest film projects: Alan Parker's 1984 drama "Birdy."

In the film, Cage's character, Al Columbato, is severely injured in a helicopter crash while serving in the Army during the Vietnam War. To drive home the extent of Columbato's wounds, Cage pulled two of his own teeth. "So what happened there is I had baby teeth," Cage told Vanity Fair. Cage pulled the teeth, definitely underscoring Columbato's trauma; what he didn't take into consideration was that the teeth wouldn't grow back before he filmed his next picture, "Moonstruck." 

"You still see a gaping hole," said Cage. Oddly enough, the missing teeth seemed to work for Cage's character in that film, the lovelorn baker Ronny Cammareri, who had already proven himself prone to self-harm by losing his hand in a bread slicer.

Many of the sacrifices that actors on this list underwent for a movie role were taxing, and in a few cases, posed health challenges. Few, if any, put the performer in a life-and-death struggle, but that's exactly what Hilary Swank faced while making "Million Dollar Baby." The actress, who won her second Oscar for playing a boxer in the Clint Eastwood-directed drama, trained with such intensity that she developed a blister on her foot. Rather than seek medical attention, she popped the blister which, unbeknownst to Swank, was infected with the staphlyococcus aureas bacteria.

The bacteria, also known as staph, is common and typically doesn't present a health threat. However, in rare cases, it can enter the bloodstream and cause sepsis, an infection that if untreated, leads to septic shock, a condition that drops one's blood pressure to dangerous levels. 

Swank knew she was in trouble within 48 hours of popping the blister. "I looked down ... there were streaks going up my foot," she told "60 Minutes." Wracked with excruciating pain, she saw her doctor, who told her that she had barely escaped death. "He said, 'This is really serious. And if you had waited two more hours, you would have been in the hospital for three weeks,'" she recalled. "And if it gets to your heart, that's it." Amazingly, Swank never told Eastwood about the infection. "In the end, that's what happens to boxers," she explained.

To portray Ray Charles in the 2004 biopic "Ray," Jamie Foxx underwent an intensive program of training to transform himself into the R&B and jazz legend. He studied piano for hours every day, and even subjected himself to a grueling session with the real Charles to prove he had the chops (Charles eventually agreed that Foxx could play to his standards). Foxx also studied Braille to gain further understanding of Charles, who was blind from an early age, and dropped 30 pounds to mimic the singer's slender frame.

But to fully understand Charles' world, Foxx took his training a step further. At the behest of director Taylor Hackford, Foxx wore prosthetic makeup that sealed his eyelids shut. The prosthetics lent greater intensity to Foxx's performance, but also caused him to suffer panic attacks for the first two weeks of filming. "Imagine having your eyes glued shut for 14 hours a day," Foxx told the New York Times. "That's your jail sentence." The payoff for the pain? Foxx's turn as Ray Charles captured the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2005.

Ari Aster's "Hereditary" is a grueling exercise in horror; as the Hollywood Reporter described it, "'Hereditary' is so upsetting, so shocking, and so divisive because it throws audiences into a world where there is no control, and the rules change from one moment to the next." Among those living through that world during production on "Hereditary" was actor Alex Wolff, whose character, Peter, is subjected to his sister's decapitation, his father's charred corpse, his mother's possession by an evil spirit and eventually, all three coming together in a nightmarish tableau. Between these moments, Peter also bashes his head against a school desk to shake off terrifying visions.

In an exclusive interview with Looper, Wolff explained why he was never the same after filming "Hereditary." "I'll tell you that movie did about as much damage to me as a movie can do," he said. That damage included emotional problems and insomnia, though as Wolff noted, "I don't want to sound pretentious or self-serious. Because we have a cushy job in a lot of ways, but this, emotionally, it was one of the tough ones, it was one of those ones that really did some gymnastics on my emotional well-being."

To play hacker Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of "The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo," actress Rooney Mara took the bold move of not only adopting the character's severe hairstyle and applying temporary tattoos, but also tackling Salander's numerous piercings head-on. To fully realize Salander, Mara actually had her ears, lip, brow, nose, and nipples pierced; in an interview with Allure (via Page Six), Mara explained the reasons for undergoing the procedures.

"I'm naked quite a lot in the movie, and I thought, she has [the piercings] in the book, and she should have it [in the movie]," she said. "Because of all 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. It just felt like a good [piercing] to get — a necessary one to get."

Mara, who had no piercings prior to making "Dragon Tattoo," said that of the many piercings she underwent, the ear piercings were the most painful. "They put four holes in each ear, and weirdly, that hurt the most," she told the Daily Mail.

To play Wladyslaw Szpilman, on whose life the 2002 film "The Pianist" is based, Adrien Brody knew that he would have to reflect the incredible hardships that the real-life Polish classical musician and composer faced during World War II. Szpilman not only survived the brutality of imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, but also endured the destruction of Poland's capital city of Warsaw. To convey both Szpilman's talent and the toll of his captivity, Brody took up an intensive study of classical piano while also reducing his body weight to 130 pounds.

But Brody took the deprivations that Szpilman experienced during World War II even further. As he told SF Gate, "I gave up my New York apartment, sold my car, and turned off my cell phone." The self-imposed isolation took its toll on his personal life — his then-girlfriend broke up with him — and continued to wear on him after "The Pianist" was completed. "It wasn't just a depression," he told IndieWire. "I was very disturbed by what I embraced [in the making of that film], and the awareness that it opened up in me." Brody's efforts ultimately paid off with an Oscar win for Best Actor.

In a 20th anniversary retrospective by the Hollywood Reporter on Park Chan-Wook's South Korean thriller "Oldboy," actor Min-Sik Choi talked about the volcanic intensity that informed his performance as a man seeking revenge after 15 years of captivity. "I went to the extreme," he said. "I did it until people on the crew said, 'Please, stop now.' I was just going with the flow ... I was riding the wave of agony."

The extremes to which Choi went are evident in one of the film's most jaw-dropping scenes, a fight between his character, Dae-su, and 50 thugs that's captured in a single take. And while Choi's exhaustion in the scene is real, the fight is still an expert fusion of stunt work and directorial skill. 

For the other memorable scene in "Oldboy" – in which Dae-su eats a live, squirming octopus – no stand-in or camerawork is employed. As a behind-the-scenes video shows, Choi eats four real, live octopi, chewing with determination as the creatures' tentacles lash his face. The grim absurdity of the scene occasionally surfaces in bursts of laughter from Choi and Wook, but in terms of pure dedication to a role's inner nature, it's hard to top Choi's choice.

Silent film actor Lon Chaney, Sr. earned a reputation as "the Man of a Thousand Faces" thanks to his remarkable ability to transform himself into characters through a combination of acting ability and groundbreaking makeup of his own creation. Many of his enduring creations — the Phantom of the Opera, double amputees in "The Penalty" and "The Unknown" — required uncomfortable makeup and devices to distort his face and features. One of his most punishing designs was for 1923's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," for which he played the title role.

To portray the profoundly disfigured Quasimodo, Chaney wore a 20-pound hump made of plaster which he strapped to his back with a leather harness. Quasimodo's jagged, protruding teeth were created with an appliance made from gutta-percha, a latex-like substance produced by a Malaysian tree and used today for dental procedures, while the wart that covered his right eye was made from putty placed over adhesive tape. According to Chaney biographer Michael Blake, the putty affected Chaney's eyesight and required him to wear glasses until his premature death at the age of 47 in 1930.

According to the site Monsters of Makeup, actor Tim Curry signed on to play the demonic Darkness in Ridley Scott's 1985 fantasy "Legend" before knowing exactly what the role would require of him. As he would soon discover, special effects makeup designer Rob Bottin of "The Thing" fame had crafted an elaborate and complicated look for Darkness that required Curry to obscure his entire face and body with articulate applications that transformed him into a sculpted, scarlet-red demon, complete with cat's-eye contact lens and a pair of five-foot-long horns.

Curry also had to learn to walk and run on stilts in order to approximate Darkness's massive eight-foot stature (which, with the horns, topped out at 13 feet). As Scott stated in a behind-the-scenes documentary, Curry was initially less than pleased at wearing the makeup, which took between five and eight hours to apply. But upon catching a glimpse of the full Darkness costume in a mirror, Curry reversed his opinion. "He liked the way he looked," said Scott.

Tim Curry isn't the only actor to struggle with makeup for a film role. To play the Grinch in Ron Howard's live-action adaptation of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," Jim Carrey was encased in a spandex bodysuit covered with thick yak hair that had been dyed an appropriately Grinch-y green. The suit and facial applications, created by makeup effects legend Rick Baker, took over two hours to apply each day, and Carrey was also required to wear yellow contact lenses that were agonizing to wear.

According to Oscar-winning makeup artist Kazu Hiro, the process drove Carrey to distraction. Hiro later recalled that he and Carrey squabbled about the costume, which required numerous modifications, and that Carrey often ripped it apart to free himself. The two eventually came to an agreement over their differences, and Carrey maintained his composure with the help of an expert who trained CIA operatives to endure torture. 

As Carrey explained on The Graham Norton Show, the expert told him to distract himself by any means necessary. "Eat everything you see," he was told. "If you're freaking out and you start to spiral downwards, turn the television on, change a pattern, have someone you know come up and smack you in the head, punch yourself in the leg and smoke as much as you possibly can."