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7 Actors Who Took Method Way Too Far

Photo credit: Miramax - Paramount
Photo credit: Miramax - Paramount

From Esquire

There’s preparing for a role, and then there’s physically and emotionally abusing yourself, with the very real possibility of long-lasting damage – something which the following seven know all too well.

From no-holds-barred brawls to living like an inmate, these are the extreme lengths that some of the world’s biggest names have gone to in the name of acting. No, not acting – being.

1. Sylvester Stallone – Rocky

Photo credit: Dave J Hogan - Getty Images
Photo credit: Dave J Hogan - Getty Images

We all know just how physical Sly Stallone’s role as Rocky Balboa was and what the franchise demanded of him, consistently pushing his levels of fitness to create a performance that was entirely credible. But what we didn’t know was that Stallone was so intent on being as authentic as possible that he wanted every blow and snarl to be wholly real.

In an interview with Ain’t It Cool, Stallone was asked about the worst injury he had ever suffered on a Rocky film, and it was one that was entirely self-inflicted.

“The worst was in Rocky IV,” he replied. “In the first round, I thought these two characters [Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago] should hate each other so much that they should just attack each other like pit dogs – professionalism be damned.”

And he wasn’t messing around.

"Hey I got an idea, for the first 45 seconds, really try to knock me out, I mean go for it," Stallone instructed his co-star.

“So what you see in the first twenty seconds is real, and after the third take of taking body blows, I felt a burning in my chest, but ignored it. Later that night I couldn’t breathe very well, and they took me to the emergency room.

“My blood pressure was 200+, and the next thing I knew I was on a low-altitude flight from Canada to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and there I resided in intensive care for eight days.”

Stallone went on to say that Lundgren had hit him so hard that his heart had slammed against his breastbone and began to swell, something which it would have continued to do until it just stopped.

He added: “Many people that have car accidents die like this when the steering wheel slams into their chest. So in a sense I was hit by a streetcar named Drago.”

2. Nicolas Cage – Birdy

Photo credit: Gennadiy Avramenko / Epsilon - Getty Images
Photo credit: Gennadiy Avramenko / Epsilon - Getty Images

Pretending to be a Vietnam war veteran with severe facial injuries is challenging for even the most accomplished actors, something which Nicolas Cage immediately identified, before taking steps to bolster his performance in Birdy.

One of those measures involved having some of his teeth pulled out. Without anaesthesia, we should add.

"They were baby teeth," he told The Telegraph. “So I took advantage of it and had them out. I thought it would add an interesting dimension to the role."

He also spent five whole weeks, both on-set and off, with his head completely wrapped in bandages.

"The reactions on the street were brutal," he added. "Men and women laughing, kids staring. And when I took the bandages off, my skin was all infected because of acne and ingrowing hairs."

3. Daniel Day-Lewis – Gangs of New York, In The Name Of The Father, The Boxer and The Crucible

Photo credit: John Shearer / AP
Photo credit: John Shearer / AP

Daniel Day-Lewis admitted during an interview with The Telegraph that he “suffers doubts and anxiety before taking on a major role”, which possibly goes some way to explaining why he famously commits more than most to the characters he takes on.

When playing the role of Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Day-Lewis not only trained as a butcher and strolled around Rome, where it was filmed, picking fights with strangers, he also wore an extremely thin, barely-there woollen coat rather than a modern-made, much warmer one. His reasoning: a poor 19th-century New Yorker wouldn’t have had access to such luxuries. He ended up contracting pneumonia.

"I had to do my preparation," he told The Independent. "And I will admit that I went mad, totally mad. I remembered the days of fighting on the Millwall terraces and they stood me in good stead for Bill the Butcher. He was a bit of a punk, a marvellous character and a joy to be – but not so good for my physical or mental health."

Photo credit: Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty Images

And that wasn’t Day-Lewis’s first method rodeo. His preparations for the role of Gerry Conlon in the film In The Name Of The Father, set during the Troubles in Belfast, saw him lose 30lbs after surviving on prison rations, as well as spending long periods of time in the on-set jail, refusing sleep for two days, being interrogated for three days by actual policemen, and demanding that the crew chuck both freezing cold water and abuse at him.

For his role in The Boxer, Day-Lewis trained as a real fighter would do, which meant two sessions a day, seven days a week, for almost three years. He became so good at the craft that his trainer, retired boxer and former World Champion Barry McGuigan, said that he could have become a professional fighter if he had wanted to.

Then there was The Crucible, in which he lived without electricity or running water in the set's replica village.

Talk about dedication. Let's all give thanks he never took a role in a Saw film.

4. Shia LaBeouf – Fury and The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman

Photo credit: Axelle / Bauer-Griffin - Getty Images
Photo credit: Axelle / Bauer-Griffin - Getty Images

Shia LaBeouf isn’t a man who does things by half measures, and he revealed the lengths he went to when filming war film Fury during an interview with Dazed.

Fury is the most meat I’ve ever had to chew on,” he said. “David (Ayer, director) told us right from the gate: ‘I need you to give me everything.’ So the day after I got the job, I joined the US National Guard. I was baptised – accepted Christ in my heart – tattooed my surrender and became a chaplain’s assistant to Captain Yates for the 41st Infantry. I spent a month living on a forward operating base.

“Then I linked up with my cast and went to Fort Irwin. I pulled my tooth out, knifed my face up and spent days watching horses die. I didn’t bathe for four months. I met some tankers who told me that was just the way it was out there – some guys had the same pair of socks on for three years.”

When you put it like that, four months is nothing.

He also dropped acid for 24 hours to prepare for his role in gangster film The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman.

"There's a way to do an acid trip like Harold & Kumar, and there's a way to be on acid," he told USA Today. "What I know of acting, Sean Penn actually strapped up to that (electric) chair in Dead Man Walking. These are the guys that I look up to."

As Lord Olivier once said to Dustin Hoffman as he staggered in, sleepless, from truly living his Marathon Man role, "Why don't you just try acting?"

5. Jamie Foxx – Ray

Photo credit: Noam Galai - Getty Images
Photo credit: Noam Galai - Getty Images

"Imagine having your eyes glued shut for 14 hours a day. That's your jail sentence."

Those are the words of Jamie Foxx speaking to The New York Times about his role as blind jazz singer Ray Charles.

Foxx had prosthetic eyelids glued over his own eyes so that he couldn’t see a single thing, requiring assistants to help him on and off set.

The experience was so traumatic that Foxx suffered panic attacks and claustrophobia, which held up production.

"After six hours of being blind, you lose the sense of how a person is physically," he said of the experience.

Eventually, the rule was lifted because, as you can tell, it was a harrowing experience for the film’s leading man.

6. Dustin Hoffman – Kramer vs Kramer

Photo credit: Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty Images

In a change from the rest of this list, Dustin Hoffman used method techniques on his co-star Meryl Streep during filming for Kramer vs. Kramer.

There was a certain level of heightened emotion required for a scene that the pair were about to film, so he slapped Streep across the cheek, so hard, in fact, that he left a red mark on her face.

Also, Streep’s boyfriend, the actor John Cazale, died soon before the pair were filming Kramer vs Kramer. Hoffman, being aware of this, used it to the film's advantage.

“He was goading her and provoking her, using stuff that he knew about her personal life and about John to get the response that he thought she should be giving in the performance,” producer Richard Fischoff told Vanity Fair.

Fischoff went on to say that Streep went “absolutely white” following Hoffman's remarks, before telling her co-star that if he wanted to use method techniques like emotional recall, he should use them on himself, not her.

Hoffman also decided to launch a wineglass at the wall of a restaurant they were filming in, and failed to tell Streep his plan of action. The glass chattered, causing Streep to jump in her chair, and there were even shards of glass in her hair.

“Next time you do that, I’d appreciate you letting me know,” she said.

It's worth noting that they didn't work together again till 2004's A Series of Unfortunate Events – and even then didn't share any scenes.

7. Halle Berry – Jungle Fever

Photo credit: CBS / Amazon Prime Instant Video
Photo credit: CBS / Amazon Prime Instant Video

If you were unlucky enough to be around Halle Berry while she was filming Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, we are eternally sorry for what you had to go through.

Berry was playing the role of crack addict Vivian, but while she chose not to actually take the drug herself, she did take another drastic step to get into character.

"I didn’t smoke crack. I drew the line there,” she said. "But it was 23 years ago so I was brand spanking new and at that time all I could really do was kind of try to be it, so I didn’t shower for the whole entire time that we shot that movie, so that was probably about eight weeks.

“It was gnarly, it was gnarly."

Eight. Long. Weeks.

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