30 Famous Actors Who Might Have Taken Things Too Far For A Role

Jim Carrey fully dedicated himself to the role of entertainer Andy Kaufman in the biographical movie Man On The Moon. The character never let go of the actor even when the shooting was done for the day.

 

The actor insisted on being called Andy all of the time on the set, or Tony, the comedian's obnoxiously rude lounge singer alter ego. He didn't break character even when Kaufman's family visited the production. One of the most memorable moments was when Jim Carrey was in Tony mode. He found the keys from Danny DeVito's trailer and locked it from the outside. The he drove a car up to the door of the trailer to block it and then threw away the keys into Los Angeles River.

Gary Oldman had been asked to play Winston Churchill a couple of times before and finally, he agreed to do so for the 2017 movie Darkest Hour. The main concern was the Prime Minister's bigger frame, as the actor wasn't planning on gaining so much weight. But the problem was solved with a special fat suit.

 

Although Oldman ruled out gaining weight, he wasn't as opposed to depicting a not very healthy habit of Churchill's–smoking. He smoked at least 400 Romeo y Julieta Cubans, which were the Prime Minister's favorite, and he actually got nicotine poisoning. But the director of the film, Joe Wright, remarked, "It's Winston Churchill. You can't have Winston Churchill without a cigar."

 

The actor explained how he managed to smoke $20,000 worth of cigars: "You'd have a cigar that was three-quarters smoked and you'd light it up, and then over the course of a couple of takes, it would go down, and then the prop man would replenish me with a new cigar — we were doing that for 10 or 12 takes a scene."

Marlon Brando is the one who popularized method acting and he practiced it from the first roles he got on the big screen. He debuted in the 1950 movie The Men in which he got the main role of an ex-military man Ken Wilocek who got injured and was paralyed so he was left bound to a wheelchair.

 

To prepare for the role, Brando trusted that method acting would help him succeed. So he spent a month at the Birmingham Army Hospital in Van Nuys, Los Angeles living with paraplegics to prepare for playing an injured soldier.

Halle Berry's first movie role was in the 1991 movie Jungle Fever where she played a small role of a drug addict. Despite it being a second-plan role, the actress took it seriously, wanting to prove that she had what it took to be a movie star. How did she decide to do that? She said, "I played a crack addict, and in order to do that, I was living on the streets. So I decided I was going to see what it would be like. I didn't shower or take a bath for like two weeks." The actress said that the other crew members were nice, but she noticed that they started to distance themselves from her.

Will Smith became Paul Poitier for the 1993 movie Six Degrees Of Separation. His co-star was Stockard Channing, who played Ouisa Kittredge, and even though she was more like a mother figure in the movie, Will Smith actually fell in love with her even though he had recently married Sheree Zampino and had a baby with her.

 

The actor confessed, "The movie was over and I went home, and I was dying to see Stockard. I was like, 'Oh no! What have I done?' That was my last experience with method acting, where you're reprogramming your mind. You're actually playing around with your psychology. You teach yourself to like things and to dislike things." Will Smith promised himself that he wouldn’t use method acting ever again.

Dustin Hoffman played one of the main roles in the movie Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). He was the husband who was divorcing his wife, played by Meryl Streep. Sometimes Dustin Hoffman got into character too much and was trying to provoke Meryl Streep.

 

He actually slapped her without warning and everyone around thought that everything was over and they would get sued on top of that. However, Meryl Streep carried on with the scene. But Hoffman wasn't done. When Meryl Streep's character was alone crying in an elevator, Dustin Hoffman was standing off-screen and taunting the actress about John Cazale, her real-life partner who had died a couple of years prior. The actress commented that if Hoffman wanted to use emotional recall, he should use it on himself and not her.

 

Another time, Hoffman took a wine glass and shattered it against the wall, genuinely startling Streep. She remarked that if he wanted to do that, it would have been nice to warn her. He was doing all these things to get Streep to act like he thought she should, provoking genuine reactions when she thought she could do that just fine by herself.

South Korean actor Choi Min-sik who played the protagonist Dae-su in the thriller film Oldboy wasn't afraid to try anything to portray his character convincingly. He lost and gained weight depending on the filming schedule. He also trained for his role and was able to do most of the stunts by himself.

 

One of the most extreme things he did was burning himself with a hot wire because he didn't trust makeup artists to make the burns look real enough.

 

Another thing that not everyone would be brave enough to do is eat a live octopus, let alone four. That is how many Choi Min-sik ate, because he had to do four takes of the scene. This is real dedication, as the actor is vegetarian and a Buddhist, so he apologized and said prayers for each of the octopuses before eating them.

House Of Gucci is a recently released movie about the relationship between Patrizia Reggiani and Maurizio Gucci. The main character, Patrizia, is portrayed by Lady Gaga, who had to embody Patrizia Reggiani, the ex-wife of Maurizio Gucci, the head of the fashion house Gucci.

 

To make her performance the best, Lady Gaga told British Vogue that she was living as if she was Patrizia, "I lived as her for a year and a half. And I spoke with an accent for nine months of that." She added, "Off camera [too]. I never broke. I stayed with her."

 

Lady Gaga said, "It was nearly impossible for me to speak in the accent as a blonde," she continues. "I instantly had to dye my hair, and I started to live in a way whereby anything that I looked at, anything that I touched, I started to take notice of where and when I could see money. I started to take photographs as well. I have no evidence that Patrizia was a photographer, but I thought as an exercise, and finding her interests in life, that I would become a photographer.'

Jamie Dornan is the actor who played the serial killer Paul Spector in the crime drama series The Fall. Normal people usually don't know what goes on in a psychopath's head so the actor decided to do a little experiment and he actually followed around a woman on the London underground.

He described what it was like, "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? It felt kind of exciting, in a really sort of dirty way. I'm sort of not proud of myself. But I do honestly think I learned something from it."

Jared Leto portrayed The Joker in the 2016 movie Suicide Squad based on DC Entertainment comics. He had only about 10 minutes of screen time, but the actor wanted to leave an impression in that limited amount of time, so he let the craze into his real life too.

 

Will Smith remembers that Jared Leto never talked to him outside the scenes they were filming. They didn't even greet each other or say goodbye. Will Smith also thought that it was wrong for Jared Leto not to come to rehearsals, but eventually he realized that he didn't have to as he didn’t even need to act like The Joker because he became him. Margot Robbie, who played the Joker's love interest, Harley Quinn, received a live rat from the actor and after getting over the initial disgust, she kept it as a pet. Viola Davis, who played the government official Amanda Waller, told Vanity fair, "He had a henchman who would come into the rehearsal room, and the henchman came in with a dead pig and plopped it on the table, and then he walked out. And that was our introduction into Jared Leto."