Celebrities talk about their most difficult roles and the consequences they have left, having to fight with them even after playing them
Actress Anne Hathaway, who won her only Oscar so far for her portrayal of Fantine in Les Miserables, had to lose 26 pounds to play that character.
“I had to be obsessive about it, the idea was to look close to death. Looking back on the whole experience, and I'm not judging it in any way, it was definitely a little crazy. It was definitely a break with reality, but I think that's what Fantine is like anyway,” she said.
But the effect of the paper was not reduced to the drastic physical change.
“She was in such a state of deprivation, physically and emotionally, that when she came to my house she couldn't react to the chaos of the world without feeling overwhelmed. It took me weeks to feel like myself again," added the actress.
Joaquin Phoenix also had to lose weight for the role that won him an Oscar in 2020, the only one he currently treasures. To get into the skin of the villain Arthur Fleck, better known as The Joker, in the movie of the same name, Phoenix lost around 23 kilos.
“The first thing for us was weight loss (...) I think that's really what I started with. And it turns out that that affects your psychology. It starts to freak out when you lose that amount of weight in that amount of time."
DEFENSE MECHANISMS
In an interview with Jessica Chastain, the also actress Sophie Turner said that she developed a mechanism to have fun between scenes during the filming of Game of Thrones so as not to traumatize herself. Like her, other actresses and actors have spoken on different occasions about the impact that certain interpretations had on them.
According to the EFE agency, Turner was in her early teens when she began to play Sansa Stark, her character in the acclaimed series. And when Chastain asked her if she was still affected by it, like some kind of trauma, she said that she was sure she was going to show some symptoms in the future.
On the other hand, the designer Reynolds Woodcock, in Phantom Thread, was the last character that Daniel Day-Lewis brought to life. It happened in 2017, the same year that he announced his retirement from the world of acting. “Before making the movie, I didn't know he was going to stop acting,” recalls the actor.
Day-Lewis recounted that Paul Thomas Anderson, the film's director, laughed a lot before making it:
“And then we stopped laughing because we were both invaded by a feeling of sadness… That took us by surprise: We didn't realize what we had given birth to. It was hard to live with that. And it still is."
In fact, the actor did not see Phantom Thread and said that not wanting to see the film is related to the decision he made to stop working as an actor.
“But that is not why sadness is here to stay. That happened during the telling of the story and I really don't know why,” he said.
Margot Robbie became so immersed in the role of Tonya Harding, a real American ice skater, in I, Tonya that at times she blurred the line between acting and reality:
“She had lost her mind. I really thought we were those people and we were off the set, running down the street, yelling at each other and the cameras running after them, ”said the actress about the supposed need to go to the hospital because she really believed her hand was broken.
A thin scar on the palm of her hand was not the only mark that the filming of Nightcrawler left on Jake Gyllenhaal, one of its protagonists and producers of said production. The idea was for the character to look gaunt, so he lost around 30 pounds.
“Physically, it showed, but chemically and mentally, I think it was an even more fascinating journey. It became a struggle for me."
On that occasion, Gyllenhaal admitted that playing a character like that sometimes slipped into his subconscious.
“I always have nightmares (although) I don't really believe in nightmares. I don't think the things that scare us are in our dreams. I think it's us communicating with ourselves. Even if I'm scared, I think they're useful sometimes,” he said.
