21 Actors Who Underwent Dramatic Transformations For A Role

Gyllenhaal gained 15lbs of muscle to play a middleweight boxer in the movie ‘Southpaw,’ by working out six hours a day for six months, including at the Las Vegas gym of Floyd Mayweather, the champion boxer.
Southpaw’s director, Antoine Fuqua said that “We literally turned him into a beast. Jake, my god, he’s a very electric, powerful fighter in this movie. He’s so committed and gives his heart. The word is sacrifice.”
He was spending so much time in the gym and was so committed to the role that his relationship with Alyssa Miller ended. “The amount of time you have to put into it, the sacrifice that you put into your body, it's not something that you're eager to do again. It's a huge commitment.” Gyllenhaal said about his gruelling preparation for the role.
(Source: Huffpost)

Jonah Hill’s weight has fluctuated back and forth from lean to full-figured over the past few years. He slimmed down for the action-comedy 22 Jump Street in 2014, but gained 40lbs for his role in War Dogs in 2016 to play real-life arms dealer Efraim Diveroli.

These days Hill is a much slimmer figure in general and appears to have put his weight battles behind him. His physique looks almost unrecognizable compared to his burly figure in films like Superbad, The Sitter, and This Is the End, making for quite the body transformation.

Natalie Portman endured a punishing schedule for her role as a ballerina in Black Swan, which left her fearing she was going to die.

The waif-like 29-year-old lost 20lb for the role, eating little more than carrots and almonds on a punishing diet, and spent eight hours a day in rehearsals. Ms. Portman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the desperately ambitious, perfectionist dancer, said: "There were some nights that I thought I literally was going to die."

The film left her physically and emotionally drained: "It was the first time I understood how you could get so wrapped up in a role that it could sort of take you down."

The actress, who dislocated a rib during rehearsals, said recently: "All dancers are always dancing with an extreme injury. Not just a sore muscle, they're dancing on a sprained ankle or with a twisted neck or something. You'll see them do incredible stuff and then limp off stage, straight to a bucket of ice. Part of the art is hiding all the pain."

The film received mixed reviews from ballerinas. Racheal Prince, of Ballet British Columbia, said she thought Ms. Portman's character was exaggerated. "She's anorexic, bulimic, crazy," the 26-year-old dancer said. "I'm sure every dancer struggles with little things here and there, but for one girl to struggle with every single problem out there, it just makes us look crazy."

(Source: The Independent)

Transforming into Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, the first female Navy SEAL, for the movie G.I. Jane was not an easy task. The Demi Moore workout and diet are what she used to become G.I Jane, and included real Navy SEAL training, combined with a lot of strength, cardio, and martial arts.

For G.I. Jane, Moore’s workout would start at 4:00 am, in order to finish before filming started. Living in New York City at the time, she had multiple security guards following her while running in Central Park.

She used celebrity trainer Gregory Joujon-Roche for getting in shape, and Navy SEAL instructor Stephen Helvenston to gain that visceral, Navy SEAL mindset while filming. To immerse herself in the role she shaved her head, did Navy SEAL obstacle courses and other military-type exercises such as underwater running,  one arm pushups and sit-ups in the mud.

(Source: Pop Workouts)

J.K. Simmons seriously underwent a shred in order to play Commissioner Gordon in Justice League.

Aside from a tremendous amount of dedication to his regimen, Simmons credits part of his success to his trainer Aaron Williamson. An ex-Marine, Williamson's been providing elite-level training—morphing Hollywood A-listers into bona fide muscleheads like he's cranking out action figures on an assembly line—to the likes of Zac Efron, Dwayne Johnson, Jamie Foxx, and Jai Courtney. He first got his hands on Simmons in 2015 to help him shape up for Terminator Genisys.

At first, Simmons wanted to escape the doldrums of the film's set, which was based in Louisiana, but after shooting wrapped Simmons felt he was ready for a full-body change.

"He wanted to get into the best shape he had ever been in," Williamson says, adding, "J.K.'s goal was to adopt a healthy lifestyle and never have to worry again about health issues."

(Source: Men's Fitness)

The 47-year-old Oscar winner transformed his appearance to play gold prospector Kenny Wells, adding 47 lbs. to his typically athletic frame.

McConaughey famously lost 38 lbs. for ‘Dallas Buyers Club,’ but ‘Gold’ marked the first time he'd ever gained weight for a role without adding muscle mass. "I haven't ever done that. I said, 'McConaughey, you have six months to say yes to whatever you want to eat and whatever you want to drink. Whenever.' That was fun," he says. "The only thing that gets tiring is the thought of quitting. It was fortunate that I was like, 'Oh, this is also my job, so let's go—all green lights.'"

Surprisingly, packing on the pounds was much easier than he'd anticipated.

"My favorite food is cheeseburgers, so I was eating cheeseburgers all the time. I was making cheeseburgers. I was trying out all these fast food restaurants that I've never had, or I've only had one time," he explains. "Not that much sweets. Cheeseburgers and beer will do the trick."

In addition to eating "whatever I wanted," McConaughey stopped working out altogether. "I wouldn't even take the stairs to the second floor," he says. "That would be too much exercise."

McConaughey's three children with wife Camila Alves "loved" their dad's gluttonous phase. "I was Captain Fun—that was my nickname around the house, because I was saying 'yes' to everything. I was a really fun dad for that six months because I was like, 'No, pizza night's not just Friday night—it's Tuesday night; it's Wednesday morning.'"

(Source: E! News)

Before there was Christian Bale, Robert De Niro was the king of transformational method acting — and no film establishes this better than the Martin Scorsese classic Raging Bull. In the film, DeNiro plays Italian-American middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta, whose self-destructive behavior is chronicled over the course of several decades, and De Niro takes it upon himself to show those decades of wear through his real, physical appearance.

At the time of the film’s release, De Niro’s 60 pound weight gain was the most by any actor for a film role, but what makes the actor’s physical change so remarkable is the extremes he went through during the course of one shoot. For the majority of the film, De Niro was required to maintain the body-type of a boxing contender and only in the last scenes in the film, which depict an older, overweight LaMotta, does De Niro swing wildly in the opposite direction.

And as if the weight gain alone wasn’t enough, De Niro added the weight in truly epic fashion: the production was shut down for several weeks while the actor went to Italy and ate as much pasta as he possibly could. By the time he got back, Scorsese was so alarmed by De Niro’s weight gain and labored breathing that production was again shut down as the director feared for the actor’s health.

The shooting of the movie and De Niro's dedication to the role earned him serious respect in the film industry, on top of his amazing acting skills, and set the bar for all actors doing transformative roles since.

(Source: PK Baseline)

Before being cast in Stanley Kubrick`s ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ Vincent D`Onofrio was a trim, good-looking athlete, a rugged 6-feet-3 and--with his full head of curly dark hair--the kind of man who makes women`s heads turn.

But after winning the part of Leonard, the fat, inept and increasingly disturbed Marine recruit who serves as the dramatic fulcrum for the first half of the film, D`Onofrio was obliged to put on nearly 70 pounds and shave his head--a physical transformation that had a shocking effect.

“It changed my life,” he said. “Women didn`t look at me; most of the time I was looking at their backs as they were running away. People used to say things to me twice, because they thought I was stupid.”

The hard part was having to gain all that weight, which proved as difficult as losing it later.

“I gained weight everywhere,” D`Onofrio said. “My thighs were tremendous, my arms were tremendous, even my nose was fat. I had a tough time tying my shoelaces, but this was the only way I could play Leonard, because I had to be weak-minded in the same way. Because of the weight and the fact that he was totally out of his element, Leonard`s mind became weak.”

Inhabiting Leonard`s body had a profound effect on D`Onofrio`s perceptions. “It makes you realize all those typical things about beauty being deeper than what you would think,” he said.

(Source: Chicago Tribune)

Christian Bale didn’t just gain 42 pounds to play New York con man Irving Rosenfeld in David O. Russell’s ‘American Hustle,’ he also shaved part of his head to give extra life to Rosenfeld’s rather elaborate comb over. Bale even herniated a disc in his back as a result of his decision to give his character a slouched posture, which dropped Bale’s real-life height by three inches.

‘American Hustle’ isn’t the first time Bale has created a character with a physical tweak — he famously lost more than 60 pounds for his role in ‘The Machinist’ — but it might be his most striking transformation. Take what happened, for instance, when co-star Robert De Niro was introduced to Bale and the rest of the film’s cast before shooting a key ‘American Hustle’ scene.

“When Robert met the whole cast, he shook their hands the day we shot that scene,” Russell said at the press conference. “After he met everybody he said, ‘Who’s that guy?’ I said, ‘You just shook his hand, that’s Christian Bale.’ He said, ‘No, that guy.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s Christian Bale!’”

De Niro, who had never worked with Bale before “American Hustle,” was impressed.

“He stared and said, ‘Wow, he looks so different. It’s great,’” Russell recalled. “He didn’t realise he had just met Christian, so I had to reintroduce him again.”

(Source: Huffpost)

In his quest for authenticity in his role in the film ‘Gandhi,’ Mr. Kingsley not only shaved his head and lost 20 pounds on Gandhi's vegetarian diet, but he also studied yoga, began to meditate and learned to spin cotton thread on a wooden wheel, as Gandhi had done while holding conversations.

For Mr. Kingsley, such training is the catalyst for an alchemy even he does not understand. ''When I have totally immersed myself in the mechanical, logical preparation of a part, if I and my craft are totally bonded and fully exploited, something else in me is awakened and begins to inform my work,'' he explained.

(Source: NY Times)

Jake Gyllenhaal dropped 30lbs for the movie, ‘Nightcrawler.’  “I made a lot of choices physically,” the actor, who ran 15 miles a day just going between his house and the set, said.

In the film, Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a wild-eyed paparazzo who stalks the moonlit streets of Los Angeles in search of sordid and shocking news. Although no one would call him beefy, the star wanted to look as gaunt as his on-screen alter ego, which meant subsisting on a diet of kale salad and chewing gum while filming the role.

According to the actor, this diet, along with all the running, took a toll on his body and his personal life.

“The running thing, you’re pretty hungry because you’re not eating a lot of food,” Gyllenhaal said. “You’re lonely because you’re not meeting your friends for dinner. People go, ‘Hey, you want to meet for dinner after work?’ I go, ‘Well, I’m shooting all night.’ ‘All right, you want to meet for lunch?’ I’m like, ‘I can’t!’ So I’m gonna go run.”

It was also a transformation that Gyllenhaal didn’t notice until well after the fact, when the movie was in post-production.

“I don’t think I was aware,” he said. “I don’t think I was aware until a few months ago and we were going through all the cuts, and you start to separate from the character and go, ‘Wow,’ you know?”

(Source: Page Six)

Fox shed nearly a fifth of his bodyweight to play the emaciated villain in the heavy-duty thriller ‘Alex Cross.’ “When I took on the role in this film I said I wanted to radically change the way that I look, that’s the only way that I would buy me as that character.” It’s a bodily transformation equal to the jailhouse superman that Robert De Niro achieved in Cape Fear and a metamorphosis not dissimilar to Christian Bale’s skeletal appearance in The Machinist.

But the former Lost star wanted to change his body in a more unusual way: he wanted to do it healthily. Whereas Bale simply jacked up his cardio routine and put himself on starvation rations, Fox was determined to do it in such a way that he would have sufficient attention to work hard, think straight and generally be a functioning employee, husband and father.

“We wanted to build a physique that looked natural to the character – not just a gym body,” says Simon Waterson, the trainer who prepares Daniel Craig for his Bond roles and is recognised as the smartest cinematic body-transformer in the business. “Matthew knew exactly what he wanted to look like for the role: menacing and a little psychotic.

“We couldn’t put him on an extreme, low-calorie diet,” says Waterson. “It would have starved his brain of sugar, and his thought processes would have slowed right down. I couldn’t sap him of the energy he needed to work, so everything had to be very balanced.”

In other words, the rapid fat-zapping he undertook may have had crazy results, but it didn’t rely on lunatic methods. Rather, he trained extremely hard but very smart, stuck to a controlled but nutritionally balanced eating plan, and watched his body steadily chisel itself down to nothing but lean, taut muscle.

(Source: Men's Health)

Colin Farrell says it wasn’t hard to gain 40 lbs. in just two months for his new role as a father of two in the satirical comedy The Lobster– it just meant he had zero portion control.

“I just ate and didn’t move for a while,” Farrell, 39, tells PEOPLE of how he packed on the pounds. “It was stuff I normally eat, but just a lot more of it. People talk about portion control – there was no control!”

As soon as the film wrapped, Farrell dedicated himself to losing the extra weight. "I dropped the weight so quickly just by starving and working out," he explained.

(Source: People)

To transform into her role as "pale, anorexic" Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Rooney worked out nonstop. Based on this excerpt from an interview conducted after the film’s release, she may have been on a bit of a diet:

When a waiter appears to take our order, we are all looking at our menus, but I see out of the corner of my eye Fincher nudging Mara. He says with quiet seriousness, "You can eat." I look up to see her reaction. Mara rolls her eyes, and Fincher laughs. "You can have lettuce and a grape. A raisin if you must." She orders a piece of fish and barely touches it . . . I ask if she had to get unhealthily skinny for the role. She says, "Umm . . . not really." It hasn’t been too hard for her," Fincher quickly adds.

(Source: PopSugar)

How did Emma Stone transform into tennis legend Billie Jean King? It took a lot of sled pushes, protein shakes and a man named Jason Walsh.

"Emma took it very seriously," Jason said. "This is somebody's story that she's taken on. She wanted to make sure she could do everything possible to portray Billie Jean King in the right way."

The first step: nutrition. Jason said they needed to dial in Emma's diet by increasing calorie and fat intake, which helped for her to put on weight. Emma isn't built like a tennis player or a pro athlete, so in order to look like one, putting on those pounds and muscle was essential for the aesthetic element of becoming Billie Jean. According to the celeb trainer, the easiest way to accumulate those calories is to drink them.

"The last thing you want to do is force someone to eat a lot more food. Your hunger is going to go up naturally because your metabolism is going to go up from the training," Jason explained, adding that Emma became almost insatiable because of the intense workouts he was putting her through. "Protein shakes were an easy way for us to get a lot of nutrients and a few hundred calories in a single drink that tasted really good. She actually looked forward to it."

As for training, Emma would meet Jason five days a week, twice daily for four of those five days. Eventually, Jason transitioned the actress into fewer sessions as filming approached. In the mornings, they would work on what James calls "complex movements": sled pushes, squats and lunges—the heavy stuff. The afternoons were for "secondary movements," or what Jason describes as "less taxing, but good for aesthetics." Think exercises that target the abs and arms.

According to Jason, Emma was doing 300-pound hip thrusts, a few hundred pounds on sled pushes and her dead lift was up to around 185 pounds (wow!). But Jason is most impressed with is the star's resilience.

"What I'm really proud of for Emma and for actresses like her that we end up training is that we keep them from getting injured," he said. "When an actor has to play tennis all day long and do all these things for a movie, the chances of them getting injured if their body isn't strong and resilient is pretty high. Then that's going to stop production, and you've got other issues there."

He also said that with Emma's training came with powerful psychological benefits. "It gave her a level of confidence and it helped her believe that she was Billie Jean King. It really does give women confidence to be strong like that."

(Source: E! News)

Ryan Gosling revealed that he was fired from Peter Jackson's 2009 awards contender "The Lovely Bones" because his 60-pound weight gain did not sit well with the director and his fellow producers. Gosling said his much-ballyhooed weight gain -- fuelled by drinking melted Haagen Dazs ice cream when he was thirsty -- was all a part of how he saw the character of Jack Salmon, the grieving-father role ultimately filled by Mark Wahlberg. "We had a different idea of how the character should look," Gosling said. "I really believed he should be 210 pounds." Jackson disagreed, and dropped Gosling days before production began in 2007. "We didn't talk very much during the pre-production process, which was the problem," Gosling said. "It was a huge movie, and there's so many things to deal with, and he couldn't deal with the actors individually. I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong."

"Then I was fat and unemployed."

(Source: The Hollywood Reporter)

To portray a female boxer, Hilary Swank had to not only learn how to box, but mold her body into the guise of someone who has probably spent her whole life training. Swank had about 90 days to do it.

"My training was two and a half hours of boxing and approximately an hour and a half to two hours lifting weights every day, six days a week," Swank said. "The producers asked me to gain 10 pounds of muscle. I gained 19 pounds of muscle. I started at 110 and went to 129. And in order to do that, I had to eat 210 grams of protein a day. Now, your body can only assimilate so much protein, so I had to eat every hour and a half. So with a meal, I would drink my egg whites because I could never eat 8 to 12 egg whites in a sitting. It's just the worst thing ever. I had to drink flax oil. Flax is a really important oil for your brain and to also just keep everything moving when you're eating that much protein. It's a really important fat. Like one tablespoon of Flax oil has like 15 grams of fat in it."

Even her sleep was coordinated into her daily regimen. "The thing was, I needed nine hours of sleep a night because your muscles have to be able to rest in order to build or you actually reverse yourself. So I slept nine hours a night but I had to wake up in the night and drink protein shakes because I couldn't go that long without eating."

(Source: MovieWeb)

The Massachusetts-born actor underwent an extreme physical transformation for a role in the 1996 film Courage Under Fire. Damon had to lose 60lbs in a short period of time to play an army medic in the war drama, and in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" he revealed exactly how he cut the weight so quickly—and trust us, it doesn't sound fun.

Damon, who normally weighs around 190lbs, got down to roughly 139lbs to shoot the film, according to the AMA. "I had to run about 13 miles a day, which wasn't even the hard part. The hard part was the diet," he revealed. "All I ate was chicken breast. It's not like I had a chef or anything, I just made it up and did what I thought I had to do. I just made it up and that was incredibly challenging."

But while it may have been challenging, it was definitely effective!

(Source: Men's Fitness)

Will Smith was a relatively slim guy prior to Ali. He weighed about 185 pounds which is light for someone that stands at 6 foot 2 tall. To look the part to play Ali, Will Smith had to pack on 35 pounds of muscle to look like a real heavy weight boxer.

Critics were skeptical at the news of the skinny Will Smith playing the mighty Ali, but he hit the gym and after working out 5 days a week for 6 hours a day for almost a year he was in the shape of his life.

 “If I’d had Will when he was 20, I could’ve made a champion out of him.  He’s got the physical skills and, more importantly, he’s got the heart,” said fitness coach Angelo Dundee.

In addition to all the functional training Will had to do a lot of endurance training, and some of it included running through snow wearing boots as well as a lot of weight lifting. Will Smiths bench press increased from 175 pounds at the start of the year to 365 pounds by the time shooting for the film started.

“Beyond looking like a fighter, my goal was to learn to think like a fighter,” says Smith.  “To do that I had to eat like a fighter, sleep like a fighter, assess situations in life like a fighter… become a fighter.”

(Source: MotleyHealth)

Damon estimates that he gained between 25 and 30lbs in preparation for the movie 'The Informant,' directed by Steven Soderbergh.

"It wasn't necessarily that I needed to be fat," he said. "It was that I needed to be doughy."

Even though the weight-gain was required for the role, that didn't stop Damon's friends from mocking him mercilessly.

"Some things are just self-evident and don't even require making fun of," his best friend Ben Affleck said. "I mean the man buys two seats on an airplane!"

So how did he manage to gain so much weight? "I just stopped working out and basically just ate whatever I wanted," he said. "I ate a lot of In-N-Out, a lot of burgers, a lot of beer and basically had a great time ... When you're in your 20s you can do that kind of stuff. When you're in your 30s, its a whole different ballgame."

(Source: Huliq)

George Clooney gained 35lbs on a pasta-heavy diet to play CIA operative Robert Barnes in the movie ‘Syriana.’ The actor also shaved his hairline for the right look for his aging character.

During filming, Clooney suffered a spinal injury performing a stunt. Due to the weight he gained for his role, the injury left him bedridden for a month and caused severe migraines, which prevented him from doing publicity for Ocean's Twelve (2004). The injury was eventually corrected with surgery. Clooney has since called his weight gain "pretty stupid".

"There was nothing fun about it," said Clooney. "There was not a moment that was fun about shooting this film. That's not a slap on the film or the director (Stephen Gaghan), It's just that everybody has that year where you age a decade and this was that one for me."

(Source: IMDb)