This post contains intense diet changes, eating disorders, weight fluctuations, and anti-fat rhetoric.
1. Gained weight: Charles Melton gained about 40 pounds for his role in the upcoming movie May December. Director Todd Haynes explained that he wanted Charles to gain the weight in order to "change his chiseled self into something more familiar: a suburban man in this place."
2. Lost weight: Cillian Murphy lost a dramatic amount of weight in order to play J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer. He didn't open up exactly about his method of losing the weight, but he said, “I don’t advise it." His costar Emily Blunt added that Cillian's diet for this movie was very restrictive. "He had such a monumental undertaking," she said. "And he could only eat, like, an almond every day. He was so emaciated.”
3. Gained weight: Rob McElhenney gained over 50 pounds for the seventh season of his show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. To gain the weight he ate about five 1,000 calorie meals per day, he explained. He started off at 160 pounds, and by the end, he "got up to 212."
4. Lost weight: 50 Cent lost over 50 pounds for All Things Fall Apart, where he plays a cancer patient in tribute to a friend of his who died from the disease. He said, "I had so much muscle on me that it was hard for me to lose definition even as I got lighter and slimmer. I started running to suppress my appetite. Toward the end it was really difficult. It was like, if I don't get close enough to what my best friend looked like to me at that point before he passed, then I'm not doing the story any justice."
5. Gained weight: Charlize Theron gained about 50 pounds in three months for her starring role in Tully. At the time, she said, "I just wanted to feel what this woman felt, and I think that was a way for me to get closer to her and get into that mindset. You know, it was a huge surprise to me. I got hit in the face pretty hard with depression. Yeah, for the first time in my life I was eating so much processed foods, and I drank way too much sugar. I was not that fun to be around on this film."
6. Lost weight: Christian Bale lost around 60 pounds for his role in The Machinist. His extremely restrictive diet consisted of black coffee, a single apple, and a tin of tuna every day. He also said, "I came up with the absolutely brilliant method of just smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey to lose weight." He also intended to lose even more weight, but the movie's producers stopped him because of the health risks.
7. Gained weight: Chris Pratt gained 30–40 pounds while playing Andy on Parks and Recreation. At first, he said he'd watched a few episodes and thought he "let [himself] go" but then realized this was the "funniest stuff [he's] ever done" and decided to challenge himself to see how much weight he could gain.
8. Lost weight: Anne Hathaway lost “an unhealthy amount of weight in two weeks" to play Fantine in Les Misérables. “That weight loss was not a long-term good thing for my health, and it took a really long time to come back from it,” she said. “And I was still really sick because of it.”
9. Gained weight: Reneé Zellweger gained about 30 pounds in order to star in Bridget Jones’s Diary. At the time, she explained that she struggled to gain the weight and was on a reported 4,000-calorie-per-day diet. After playing the role, Reneé was constantly asked how she lost the weight and said, “It saddens me so much because it seems to imply that one way of being is acceptable and the other isn’t valuable, and that’s just not true.”
10. Lost weight: Sam Claflin lost about 10 pounds so he could play Billy Dunne in the miniseries Daisy Jones & the Six. He had to lose a lot of the muscle he had previously built so he turned to cardio-driven exercise like cycling and running. “If you watch any videos of any musician of [the '70s], they’re all very wiry and not much muscle,” he said. “Also, Billy’s obviously an addict.”
11. Gained weight: Kumail Nanjiani gained about 25 pounds of muscle for the Marvel movie Eternals. In order to do it, he had to work out five days a week doing a bodybuilding split, where he focused on one or two muscle groups at a time. He also followed a high-protein, moderate-fat diet, while keeping his carbs low during the week and then loading up on the weekends. “I would not have been able to do this if I didn’t have a full year with the best trainers and nutritionists paid for by the biggest studio in the world,” he said. “I’m glad I look like this, but I also understand why I never did before. It would have been impossible without these resources and time.”
12. Lost weight: David Harbour lost 75 pounds for the fourth season of Stranger Things, where his character was locked up in a Soviet prison. He said, "I did a lot of intermittent fasting, which I know is sort of the diet of the moment, but it really did work for me. I don’t know if it’s just code for starvation, but it’s basically like… I was hungry a lot of the time."
13. Gained weight: Jake Gyllenhaal gained 28 pounds of muscle for his role as a boxer in Southpaw. He trained seven days a week for six months with multiple workouts each day. His trainer Terry Claybon explained, "We were working out three hours in the a.m., three hours in the p.m., six hours total a day, seven days a week."
14. Lost weight: Matthew McConaughey lost 50 pounds for his role in Dallas Buyers Club. Over the course of five months his diet consisted of five ounces of fish for lunch and dinner, along with vegetables with each meal and egg whites for breakfast. And as a "treat," he'd have a tiny amount of tapioca pudding. He also stopped exercising during this transition.
15. Gained weight: Mark Wahlberg gained 30 pounds for the movie Father Stu. He said that he was eating a meal about every three hours. "I put on 30 pounds and went from being a guy who was in fighting shape to a guy who was wheelchair-bound, suffering from a rare muscular degenerative disease," he said. "I was just turning 50 by the time we finished the movie, and I was eating 11,000 calories a day. That drastic weight gain really took a toll on me over the course of the last seven, eight months."
16. Lost weight: Chris Hemsworth had to lose 15 pounds for In the Heart of the Sea. He'd previously lost weight for the movie Blackhat so to him, the weight loss was "brutal." "Every pound feels like a kilogram," he said. In order to play a man who was stranded at sea, Chris had to work out every day and only eat about 500 calories a day.
17. Gained weight: Hilary Swank put on 23 pounds of muscle for Million Dollar Baby. She even said that the training for this movie was one of the hardest things she's ever done. “I started working out five hours a day — I had to eat 210 grams of protein a day,” she said. “I don’t know if you guys are aware of intake of protein. … I had to eat 60 egg whites in a day, and I couldn’t. So every morning I would drink them. I had to eat every hour and a half. So in the night, I had to wake up and drink protein shakes."
18. Lost weight: Joaquin Phoenix lost 52 pounds for Joker because director Todd Phillips thought the character would be "super thin." Joaquin lost the weight with the guidance of a doctor, but said the experience still affected his eating habits and mental health afterwards. “Once you reach the target weight, everything changes,” he said. “Like so much of what’s difficult is waking up every day and being obsessed over like 0.3 pounds. Right? And you really develop, like, a disorder. I mean, it’s wild.”
19. Gained weight: Chris Messina gained 40 pounds for the movie Live by Night. "It was fun. It was a lot of fun," he said. "[I] just stuffed my face. Beer — lots of beer — bagels, pasta. I would have a beer by the bedside table, and I woke up in the middle of the night to pee, and I'd just chug the beer."
20. Lost weight: Natalie Portman lost 20 pounds to star in Black Swan. Her diet while filming the movie was very restrictive, and she was "just living on carrots and almonds." In addition to her limited food intake, Natalie would also spend eight hours a day in rehearsals. She said, "There were some nights that I thought I literally was going to die."
21. Gained weight: Finally, Taylor Lautner gained 35 pounds between filming Twilight and New Moon since his character had to bulk up to fit his werewolf persona. He said, "In the first movie, I was 140 pounds, and in New Moon I was 175. So yeah, that wasn't my natural body. I had to work very hard for it and very, very hard just to maintain it." He added that he was "forced to be in a gym multiple times a day, six days a week."
EXmas, starring Leighton Meester and Robbie Amell, is streaming now for free on Freevee.
