Actors do peculiar things in pursuit of "Meaty" roles.
I don’t know if it was gout — but I had a definite problem with my feet. Towards the end of the shoot, one of the glaring issues was the pain I had with my feet. I couldn’t walk for long distances; I had a wheelchair because it was so painful. My body was in shock from the amount of weight I gained.”
That’s the American actor Jared Leto speaking. He was only 35 at the time, and the shoot he mentions was for Chapter 27, the 2007 film in which he played John Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman. For that role, Leto put on about 28 kg in a hurry. How did he do it? Here’s the recipe: litres and litres of Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice-cream, microwaved together with olive oil and soy sauce.
Leto is hardly unusual. Ever since Robert De Niro went from fab to flab for his 1980 film Raging Bull — where he played a boxer, first in competition form and then years later, washed-up and 28 kg heavier — Hollywood actors have been putting on and taking off astonishing amounts of weight at high speed to perform specific roles.
Bollywood was not far behind. It may not be the first such instance, but it is still remembered that Shabana Azmi, then 35, lost a lot of weight for her National Award-winning role in Paar in 1985, as a poor slumdweller in a time of hunger.
The most extreme example is from Hollywood. Christian Bale, 29, dropped 28 kg in four months, to around 54 kg, to play a very thin character in The Machinist in 2004. His recipe? A cup of coffee and an apple or can of tuna a day. “I couldn’t do a single push-up,” Bale told an interviewer. But his next film was Batman Begins in 2005, and, to play Batman, Bale ate and worked out to boost his weight by a full 45 kg in a few months.
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More recent examples from Bollywood abound. At the same time that Shah Rukh Khan was pioneering a trend towards six-pack abs for male actors, Abhishek Bachchan was growing himself a paunch to play the prosperous capitalist in 2007’s Guru. (Of course, he lost the paunch in time for the premiere — but that, he revealed, was much harder work.) Aamir Khan lost fat and gained muscle for Ghajini, losing 11 kg in the process. His recipe? A high-protein, low-fat diet and daily hours of agony in the gym (1,000 crunches) for many months.
Shilpa Shetty revamped her look entirely, not for a movie role but to take part in the UK reality show Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. Since that’s a popularity contest in which viewers vote out cast members, Shetty was wise in going for what she called a “European” look — lean and muscled — rather than the slim and delicate profile which most Indian female actors choose. She did it in a hurry, too, in 12 weeks. Shetty won, so the results, it might be argued, speak for themselves.
Bollywood actors, unlike Hollywood ones, don’t talk much about the stress, nor the actual numbers. Matt Damon, then 26, shed more than 20 kg to play a heroin addict in 1996’s Courage Under Fire. He said: “I went too far. I got sick and I wouldn’t do that again because it was just too much. At the same time it helped the performance. I didn’t have to act at all — I was a wreck. I was getting dizzy spells and hot flashes. I didn’t say anything to anyone for a while because I was afraid I might be really ill.” But he did do it again, gaining 15 kg for a lead role in the upcoming The Informant.
Dr B Sesikeran, director of the National Institute of Nutrition in Hyderabad, offers an insight into the physiological effects of rapid weight loss and gain. “Let’s say I am overweight and I want severe loss, and I reduce intake. We assume that body fat will get melted away. But muscle also gets wasted. Later on, I put on weight: only the fat comes back. Each time I do that I lose muscle protein.”
The separate implications for women are potentially life-changing: “If women are in the reproductive age [which most actresses are],” he says, “drastic weight changes can cause hormonal changes. Some hormones are linked to [body] fat — oestrogen, progesterone.” There may even be menstrual effects. “The body can compensate with a range, not outside it.”
He also points out that much depends on whether the actor’s body is healthy and well cared-for to begin with. If it is not, hidden problems can surface in a dangerous way, such as kidneys damaged by a high-protein diet.
Rather than hiring actors of the appropriate size, directors and casting agents choose the biggest names. And, driven by the professional need to perform and a natural obsessiveness, actors push their bodies to and beyond the limits in order to “be the part”. It’s rather more than acting as we’ve known it, and also somewhat less.
