Mark dropped 60 pounds for his part in ‘The Gambler’ and says he starved himself until his lips turned blue: ”I went from 197 to – the lightest I’d ever been in a movie was in ‘Boogie Nights’, I was 138 – so I wanted to beat that. I beat it by a pound, so 137. I was losing weight while we were shooting the movie too, so continuity kind of went out of the window. [I had] no energy, no nutrition, and the studio, there was a complaint about that, that my lips were always looking blue.”
Matthew McConaughey
Matthew had to look bone thin for his part in ‘Dallas Buyers Club’. He explained how he prepared: “I lived like a bit of a hermit for four months and ate just fish and a cup of vegetables in the morning, and tapioca pudding. I was eating decent meals, just small amounts and I didn’t go outside when the sun was out because I had to be pale.”
For ‘Castaway’, Tom says losing weight was a big mental challenge: “The hardest thing was the time, I wish I could have just taken a pill and lost all the weight but the reality was that I had to start in October knowing that we were going to go back in February. The idea of looking at four months of constant vigilance as far as what I ate, as well as two hours a day in the gym doing nothing but a monotonous kind of work-out—that was formidable. You have to power yourself through it almost by some sort of meditation trickery. It’s not glamorous.”
