14 Wild Things Actors Did To Prepare For Their Roles

Find out what these stars did to prepare for their roles…

While getting ready for his role in Good Time, Robert Pattinson moved to New York City and lived undercover as his character. He rented a basement apartment in Harlem, much like his character, and got a job at a car wash — but didn’t last very long.

“I never opened my curtains, didn’t change the sheets the entire time I was there, for those two months, and I would just sleep in my clothes. There was this woman who lived upstairs, and she kept trying to see what was going on because she thought I was such a weirdo,” Robert shared with news.com.au.

He continued, “I kept really weird hours, and I would run in and quickly close the curtains. I was like this freak living in the bottom of the basement. I was by myself the whole time. I only ate cans of tuna the whole time. I probably have mercury poisoning now because I ate it just out of the can. That’s all that was there: tuna, hot sauce, and Nespresso capsules.”

In order to prepare to play Patrizia Gucci in House of Gucci, Lady Gaga lived as her character. She dyed her hair, gained weight and for nine months leading up to filming, she spoke exclusively in an Italian accent. She even wrote an 80-page biography of Patrizia, ensuring that she knew everything about her and could channel her darkness. She ended up needing a psychiatric nurse with her because she “felt that it was safer” for her.

“I don’t think that any actor should push themselves to that limit. And I ask myself all the time why I do that. I’ve done some pretty extreme art pieces throughout my career — the things I’ve put my body through, my mind. It’s like a walnut of sadness in my stomach as I say this to you. I don’t know why I’m like that,” she told Variety.

She continued, “I think that the best answer I could give you is I have a sort of romantic relationship with suffering for your art that I developed as a young girl, and it just sometimes goes too far. And when it does go too far, it can be hard to reel it in on your own…It’s okay to ask for help. If you’re feeling like that, ask for help. No matter what.”

When Jamie Dornan was cast to portray serial killer Paul Spector in The Fall, he decided to get into the mind of a criminal by crossing some boundaries. Jamie says he actually briefly stalked a woman he didn’t know in order to get into character — before realizing he was making a big mistake.

“This is a really bad reveal: I, like, followed a woman off the train one day to see what it felt like to pursue someone like that. I really kept my distance. She got off a few stops earlier than I was planning, so I said right, I have to commit to this. I followed her around a couple of street corners and then was like: What are you doing?” he told the LA Times.

Shia LaBeouf is no stranger to doing extreme things to get into character — even if it means putting himself through a lot of pain. While he was getting ready to film Fury, he got one of his teeth pulled to accurately represent his character’s appearance. He actually had a hard time getting it done because dentists in Los Angeles didn’t think it made “medical sense.”

“That was a real mission, getting it out, because it’s not like you can go to some dentist around here from this side. You go in there like, ‘Hey, I wanna get this tooth taken out,’ and they’re like, ‘You wanna do what? That doesn’t make any medical sense at all, man,’” he explained on Jimmy Kimmel Live! “So, I found a guy in Reseda next to a Radio Shack, and he didn’t ask too many questions. He’s like, ‘Which one? No problem.’”

Nicolas Cage also altered his appearance by getting some teeth pulled in preparation for a role. Leading up to the filming of Birdy, where he played a wounded Vietnam veteran, Nicolas got two of his teeth pulled out. While they didn’t need to be removed, they were baby teeth —  and Nicolas then had to wait for his adult teeth to grow in after the movie wrapped.

“So what happened there is I had baby teeth. I had done a picture called Birdy and I decided to pull my baby teeth out for that character, Al Columbado, but then they hadn’t grown in yet when I did Moonstruck, so you still see a gaping hole,” he told Vanity Fair.

When Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams were playing a couple in Blue Valentine, they actually moved in together in the house where the movie filmed to get the full emotional impact of being in a relationship that was crumbling. They spent the first half of their time on set filming the happy flashback scenes of their relationship and then moved in together before filming the second half where their relationship went downhill.

“During the month, we tried to dismantle this thing that we had been building,” Ryan shared on NPR’s Fresh Air. “[Originally,] we all worked really hard to create this love story portion, when they’re falling in love. We wanted it to feel genuine and real and true. And we spent all of this time building it up, and then we had to tear it down.”

When Ashton Kutcher was cast to play Steve Jobs in his biopic, he decided to live like the late Apple founder. While doing research, Ashton discovered that Steve lived by a mostly fruitarian diet, which emphasizes eating mostly fruit, as well as some nuts, seeds and grains. Steve particularly often drank Odwalla carrot juice, which Ashton decided to do as well — but it ultimately landed him in the hospital.

“So, I started just drinking carrot juice nonstop all day long. Two weeks before we went to start shooting and all of a sudden I had this pain in my back and through the night it got worse and worse and worse. I ended up in the hospital…because my pancreas was, like, crazy out of whack,” Ashton shared on Hot Ones.

He continued, “Then I’m getting freaked out like, ‘Oh my god I’ve become Steve Jobs.’ He died of pancreas [cancer]. This is the ghost of Steve Jobs taking over my pancreas! Turns out it was the carrot juice that was causing this crazy pancreatitis.”

To prepare for Nicole Kidman’s role as Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos she actually took up smoking in order to nail the late comedian’s voice. Nicole says she began smoking herbal cigarettes and it helped her eventually be able to channel Lucille’s raspy voice on her own.

“I smoked cigarettes as Lucille. I was smoking because you can’t kind of fake that. They were herbal cigarettes but I was still smoking, you know…And I think the tiredness. Then once my body was trained to create those sounds, it was actually much easier to access them,” Nicole shared on The Jess Cagle Show.

Joaquin Phoenix is no stranger to method acting for his roles so it’s no surprise that he went to great extremes to prepare for his role in The Master. In order to play his character, who had a clenched jaw, Joaquin had brackets fastened to his teeth so that he could keep one half of his jaw shut while speaking.

“My dad sometimes would talk out of the side; he’d clench down one side of his mouth. And I just thought it represented tension in this way, somebody that’s just blocked and tight. So I actually went to my dentist and I had them fasten these metal brackets to my teeth on the top and the bottom and then I wrapped rubber bands around it to force my jaw shut on one side,” Joaquin told KCBX.

He continued, “After a couple weeks, the bands, they weren’t really strong enough to kind of hold it so I ended up getting rid of the rubber bands and I still had these metal brackets in and so it made me constantly aware of my cheek. You know, they had these pointy tips so they’d tear up the cheek a little bit, so I just then was constantly aware of it.”

Before Benedict Cumberbatch filmed The Power of the Dog, he moved to Montana for two months to learn how to become a rancher. He worked on a cattle ranch and attended a three-week boot camp to learn horse-riding, rope-throwing, castrating bulls, and playing the banjo. When it came time to film, Benedict was prepared for anything.

“Everything I did in the film, I did for real,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

Adrien Brody gave up a majority of his worldly possessions in order to prepare for his role in The Pianist. To portray his character, who lost everything during the holocaust, he says he got rid of his home, his car and moved to Europe. He even allegedly ended his relationship with his girlfriend.

“I gave up my apartment, I sold my car, I disconnected the phones, and I left,” he told BBC. “I took two bags and my keyboard and moved to Europe.”

While it may be a controversial choice now, Hilary Swank decided to live as a man for several weeks to prepare for her role in Boys Don’t Cry, where she played a transgender man. She explained that she didn’t want to do the movie if she didn’t think she could pass as a boy in real life.

“I knew that if I couldn’t go out on the street and pass as a boy that I didn’t want to do the movie. I knew I’d be doing it a grave injustice so I went out and lived my life as a boy for four weeks. You know, that entailed strapping my breast and packing a sock strap,” Hilary shared on Conan. “I felt an intense need just to be honest with the story and…I learned a lot about humanity and I learned a lot about myself going out on the street.”

Daniel Day-Lewis has often taken extreme measures to prepare for his roles throughout his career including his part in The Crucible. Leading up to filming, he lived on Hog Island, an uninhabited bird sanctuary island where the movie was set to film.

“It seemed that the important thing to do was some kind of physical work,” Daniel shared with Entertainment Weekly. “So I spent some time on the island, because so much of the story of those people’s lives was contained within the way they took possession of that land.”

Before Aaron Eckhart filmed Rabbit Hole, he attended a child loss support group to help him get into character. In order to be admitted, he had to lie about having a child that passed away and went as far as telling a fake story to the rest of the group. He ended up getting so wrapped up in it all that he had an emotional breakdown.

“It’s very sensitive to go in there, of course it is. I did the research. The gathering is very quiet. There’s 10 people, couples. [Their children had passed away] very recently, it’s fresh. You’re sitting in sort of a circle. Then one person goes, then two, three, then it gets to me. And by that point you’re just so flushed that you just start going and giving the details of the story,” he shared on The Howard Stern Show.