Five actors who also suffered for their art

FOXX shed 13.6kg to play Ray Charles in this 2004 biopic, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Director Taylor Hackford asked Foxx to have his eyelids glued shut beneath prosthetics during shooting.

This stressful experience caused Foxx to suffer from panic attacks.

“Imagine having your eyes glued shut for 14 hours a day,” he told the New York Times.

Luckily, the hard work paid off: Foxx won that year’s Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the blind musician.

Playing the singer kick-started a successful singing career of his own – Foxx went on to release two chart-topping albums. He returned to Charles’s music in 2006, when he won a Grammy Award for his performance on Kanye West’s Gold Digger – a song built around a line from Charles’s I Got a Woman.

Shia LaBeouf (‘Fury’)

HE MAY be better known for his bizarre publicity stunts than his acting chops, but LaBeouf proved his Method mettle in this gritty World War 2 drama, playing the gunner of a Sherman tank.

Director David Ayer insisted his lead actors should undergo an intensive training programme, including a one-week military bootcamp run by Navy Seals. They lived together in the tank for days on end, leading to violent scraps between them.

For some, the sudden change of lifestyle was a severe jolt. But not for LaBeouf. He had already signed up for the US National Guard the day after being cast, where he was baptised, tattooed and spent a month living on a military base. From there, things became stranger; unhappy with his make-up effects, LaBeouf would cut his own face for added realism.

He told Dazed magazine, “I pulled my tooth out, knifed my face up and spent days watching horses die. I didn’t bathe for four months.”

Hilary Swank (‘Boys Don’t Cry’)

THIS film was a passion project for first-time writer-director Kimberly Peirce, who spent half a decade researching the events leading up to the death of Brandon Teena, a transgender man murdered in 1993 after a sexual assault.

After a four-year search for the right actor, Pierce finally settled on the then-unknown Hilary Swank. Swank lived as a man for a month in preparation for filming, cropping her hair and binding her chest with tension bandages. Her own neighbours were convinced by her transformation, and assumed the “young man” who frequently visited her home must have been her brother. Swank won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for the role.

Daniel Day-Lewis (‘My Left Foot’)

DANIEL Day-Lewis is well known for his immersive rehearsal process, but his 1989 performance as the disabled Irish writer and painter Christy Brown took things a little far.

After researching the effects of cerebral palsy, he refused to leave his character’s wheelchair between takes, and even asked members of the crew to spoon-feed him his meals. At the end of the filming day, he would be lifted into and out of his driver’s car.

His commitment to the role led Day-Lewis to both film prizes and serious personal injury: by maintaining Brown’s tortured posture, he put severe strain on his ribcage, and eventually broke two ribs under the pressure. Day-Lewis won a Bafta and an Oscar for his performance, while the film also led to a resurgence of interest in Brown’s memoir of the same name, written using only his left foot.

Christian Bale (‘The Machinist’)

CHRISTAN Bale virtuallly starved himself in 2004 to play the titular insomniac factory worker in Brad Anderson’s psychological thriller. Living on just 200 calories a day, Bale’s diet consisted of “water, an apple and one cup of coffee per day, with the occasional whisky”. He added: “I decided no more social life, no more friends, no more dinners, no more drinks.” Bale’s drastic weight loss came as a surprise to the film’s scriptwriter, who had suggested an appropriate weight for a 5ft 6in actor.

Although Bale is over six feet tall, he insisted on reaching the weight mentioned in the script.To regain weight for Batman Begins, which began filming shortly afterwards, Bale binged on pizza and ice-cream.