In an interview published earlier this year, Jamie Dornan revealed that, in preparation for his turn as a serial killer in the BBC series The Fall, he once followed a woman off a train “to see what it felt like to pursue someone like that.” He explained that the experience helped inform his understanding of his character. “I do honestly think I learned something from it, because I’ve obviously never done any of that,” Dornan told the Los Angeles Times.
“It was intriguing and interesting to enter that process of ‘What are you following her for?’ and ‘What are you trying to find out?’”
The Fifty Shades of Grey star is hardly the first to take his commitment to acting to an extreme level. Here, thirteen other actors who went above and beyond for a movie role.
After filming Ron Howard’s whaling epic, In the Heart of the Sea, Chris Hemsworth was a shell of his former hammer-wielding self. Last month, the Thor star tweeted out a photo to show just how much the 500-calorie-a-day diet changed his appearance. “Just tried a new diet/training program called Lost at Sea,” he wrote. “Wouldn’t recommend it.” Hemsworth spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the difficulty of the extreme dietary restrictions. “When you’re already starting off lean, it’s brutal to chew through that kind of weight. Every pound feels like a kilogram,” he said. “We kind of went insane, weighing ourselves every day. We all felt like a bunch of supermodels, trying to get down in weight for a show or something,” Hemsworth added. “That’s all we spoke about. You’ve got 15 burly blokes on the sea and all we talked about was our diet and who’d lost more weight and who’s looking really skinny. It’s ridiculous!”