Yo-yo dieting part of Tinseltown territory
Starvation and gorging are part of the job description for many A-list stars — but is it worth it?
It’s hard to believe that the roid-raging behemoth seen in Southpaw is the same person as the haunted, nebbishy guy in Nightcrawler.
But that’s Hollywood for you. Jake Gyllenhaal is just one of the A-listers who can gain and lose weight with alarming frequency. First, he’s the underfed Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler and, a few months later, he’s bulked up beyond recognition, playing boxer Billy Hope in Southpaw.
The yo-yoing must be a torturous process — and sometimes it also seems like a misguided one.
Maybe packing on muscle is a necessary first step for a boxing role. But it also seems like a lot of trouble for a movie that’s essentially a Rocky retread. Southpaw had only a so-so box office and probably won’t be winning any awards. Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal was nominated for a Golden Globe for playing Bloom, but was slimming down all that essential for the role? Not really.
Let’s look at some other actors who have ballooned, Hulk’d or shed pounds all in the name of dramatic authenticity. George Clooney The movie: Syriana The role: Bob Barnes, a CIA agent thrown into the field on a dangerous mission after years on desk duty. Clooney gained about 30 pounds in a month to play the pencil pusher. Worth it? Clooney hated gorging on all that pasta. “Mostly you just ate until you wanted to throw up, and made sure you didn’t throw up,” he told reporters while promoting the movie. True, Clooney won an Oscar for the role. But was the weight gain really necessary for it? By now, movie audiences are accustomed to seeing glamorous stars in regular-Joe roles. Renée Zellweger The movie: Bridget Jones’s Diary The role: The lovable boozehound of a title character. Zellweger had to add about 20 pounds to her tiny frame by eating croissants, cheesecake and whatever else she could get her hands on. Worth it? Bridget’s desire and inability to lose weight is a major theme in the bestselling books by Helen Fielding, so the weight gain was necessary for the diminutive Zellweger. The movie did massive box-office numbers and earned Zellweger an Oscar nomination, so all signs point to yes. However, it hardly seems like it was worth her time to gain weight again for the disappointing sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Gerard Butler The movie: 300 The role: The Spartan King Leonidas. Butler said he trained for seven months for those washboard abs. Worth it? Since that 2006 hit, the media has consistently scrutinized Butler’s fluctuating weight, always comparing him to his 300 peak. So he may be regretting it. Charlize Theron The movie: Monster The role: Real-life prostitute turned serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Theron chowed down on Krispy Kremes and potato chips to add 30 pounds.
Worth it? Theron has said that adding the weight — not to mention ditching her eyebrows and adding some less-than-flattering makeup — helped her get into character. Hey, whatever it takes. Theron’s performance was one for the history books, and she won an Oscar for her trouble. Matt Damon The movie: Courage Under Fire The role: A drug-addicted military veteran. Damon ran twice a day and ate minimally to drop 40 pounds for the role. Worth it? Damon’s commitment to a relatively small part got him notice from big-time directors, including Francis Ford Coppola. So it was good for his career. But it was less good for his body.
“I just didn’t know the effects would be so long-lasting,” he said in an interview, months after the 1996 movie’s premiere. “I went to a doctor in Boston after I got back from shooting and he said, ‘The good news is that your heart didn’t shrink.’ But my blood sugar was all messed up and I’m still on medication to correct that.” Kit Harington The movie: Pompeii The role: A gladiator called “the Celt.” The erstwhile Jon Snow was used to hiding under many layers of fur on Game of Thrones, so Harington had to work to amp up the biceps.
It took about five weeks, including a period where he ate as much as he could and did very little other than lift weights — but then “you go from eating over 4,000 (calories) to under 2,000, so you’re starving and, as I understand it, it strips the excess fat away,” Harington said while promoting the movie.
“After that it’s just maintaining, going to the gym every day, three times a day, six days a week, and it became obsessional.”
Was it worth it? Did you see Pompeii? Right. Tom Hanks The movie: Cast Away The role: A plane-crash survivor marooned on an island. Hanks gained 40 pounds for the first portion of the movie and then spent about a year losing all that and more by eating next to nothing. Worth it? His doctor may not think so. The weight change made for a dramatic transition in the movie, but Hanks revealed in 2013 that he has Type 2 diabetes and yo-yo dieting may be partially to blame.
This wasn’t his only transformational role — he packed on pounds for A League of Their Own and shed a bunch for Philadelphia — but it’s one of the most startling. Hanks received an Oscar nomination for his role, but it wasn’t like he needed more of those. Robert De Niro The movie: Raging Bull The role: Prize fighter Jake La Motta. As with Cast Away, Raging Bull required two different looks for the protagonist. De Niro spent about a year training to look like a boxer, adding 20 pounds of muscle to his frame. But he also had to portray the over-the-hill version of La Motta, which entailed four months of extreme food consumption in Europe, gaining 60 pounds. Worth it? De Niro is astonishing in Raging Bull, but a lot of that was, you know, acting. He took home the Oscar, so that was a plus for him — but the 1980 movie got this whole crazy trend started.
Now, extreme weight changes are considered a fast track to awards buzz and a handy publicity tool for marketing a movie. Christian Bale The movie: Basically all of them. The roles: Bruce Wayne, Patrick Bateman, Trevor Reznik in The Machinist, The Fighter’s Dicky Eklund and American Hustle’s Irving Rosenfeld, to name a few. Bale is the king of Hollywood yo-yo dieting, dropping 60 pounds for The Machinist — and making himself so emaciated he was nearly unwatchable — before getting Batmobile-ready for The Dark Knight a few months later. And somehow he managed to turn all of that muscle into fat for American Hustle, where his beer belly was glorious, though frankly it was his comb-over that really stole the show. Worth it? Bale’s weight-control skills have become his calling card. But his shape-shifting is starting to seem like a gimmick: “Oh, he’s ripped again?” you say after watching his latest trailer. Yawn. That being said, the movies are all either blockbusters or critically acclaimed, and Bale won an Oscar for The Fighter, one of the movies that involved extreme weight loss. Plus he has yet to announce he has serious health problems, so we’ll call that a win.