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Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 1

Posted by Peter Smith
There was a bit of brouhaha recently over Ryan Gosling's getting fired from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones for having packed on too much weight. The story has since been denied, so we don't know whom to believe in that dispute. It may have been apocryphal, but the incident did get us thinking about some of the more notable bodily transformations we've seen on film. And we're talking real transformations here. (Sorry, Nicole Kidman's fake nose in The Hours and John Hurt's fake face in Elephant Man and Eddie Murphy's whole body in like every other movie.) We're talking De Niro eating his way through Italy to plump up for Raging Bull. We're talking Christian Bale starving himself silly for The Machinist. We're talking about actors so devoted to their craft (and, in at least one case, so utterly stupid) as to commit their bodies to real, physical changes for a part. Here are the Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film.



ROBERT DENIRO in RAGING BULL (1980)

When Robert DeNiro won an Academy Award for Best Actor in his role as tortured prizefighter Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, he found that after the ceremony, nobody wanted to talk about it. Everybody was far more interested in discussing his role as would-be political assassin Travis Bickle in 1976's Taxi Driver — a role which allegedly inspired the actual assassination attempt of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley only days before. Now that things have lightened up a bit, and DeNiro isn't distracting everybody by making good movies anymore, his role as LaMotta has become the textbook case for total character immersion. To play the young, lean LaMotta, DeNiro worked his then-slender physique into even better condition, going through the actual workout regimen of a prizefighter (he even entered, and won, a handful of amateur bouts) and honing his body into a whipcord-thin, muscle-rippled wonder. Then, to play the older, decaying LaMotta, he put back all the weight and more, gaining a stunning sixty pounds and utterly transforming himself into a doughy blob of a man whose muscle had all collapsed into fat. There were many more sacrifices, mental and physical, made for Raging Bull: DeNiro really did bash his head into that concrete wall, and Joe Pesci broke a rib during an unsupervised fistfight. But it's the lightning-fast loss and gain of weight that's still remembered today, and which rang out like a challenge to other actors — one that would soon be answered.



VINCENT D'ONOFRIO in FULL METAL JACKET (1987)

Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam-War epic still has a very mixed reputation. While it's no longer widely considered a failure, most critics still maintain that it's a mushy, aimless middle held together by an incredibly strong beginning and end. The anchor of the opening sequence, a brutal story of Marine Corps basic training, is the conflict between the relentless, abusive Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) and the slow, heavy recruit Pvt. Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio). Both actors were appearing in their first major roles, but while Ermey had the distinct advantage of essentially playing himself, D'Onofrio transformed himself both psychologically and physically, from an urbane, gentle Brooklynite to a dull-witted, marginally psychotic southerner who needed only the right stimulus to be pushed over the edge. The fact that D'Onofrio broke Robert DeNiro's Raging Bull record by gaining seventy pounds to play Pyle sounds more impressive than it actually is — seventy pounds on his hulking, six-foot-four-inch frame wears a lot less visibly than does sixty pounds on DeNiro's much smaller 5'9" physique. Indeed, it's a testament to DeNiro's then-superhuman abilities that he managed to go through the entire cycle of transformation in half the time it took D'Onofrio, who needed a year and a half to gain, and then lose, the seventy pounds. But it's still an amazing accomplishment, one that helped yield the perfect body for one of the most memorable characters in the annals of war films.




LINDA HAMILTON in TERMINATOR 2 (1991)

To really appreciate Linda Hamilton's transformation from Sarah Connor in T1 to Sarah Connor in T2, you have to step back and remember the '80s. Sure, these days, when G. Stef has a one year old and a six-pack, muscles are practically de rigeur. But the '80s were the era of the twenty-minute workout: aerobics, jogging and jazzercize were the norm. Jane Fonda was the model of female fitness, and bouncing was a way of life. In T1, Linda Hamilton played a normal looking waitress with nice big eighties hair. Flash forward seven years to T2. To play Sarah Connor, the institutionalized warrior with Cassandra-like prophecies, Hamilton strength-trained till she sculpted her body into peak form. This was a new shape for a female movie star — muscles and sinews and veins, oh my! She was strong, agile, fast and fearless. And hot. She quickly re-set the standard for the female physique; magazine articles told women how to get a Sarah Connor-like body for summer. Did she pave the way for a rash of muscled heroines in leading roles on the big screen? Not quite — but she did her part. And her transformation was iconic enough to give Sarah Connor (the character) her own show in January '08 — sixteen years after Linda Hamilton shocked Hollywood with her abs and buns and everything else of steel.

MARIEL HEMINGWAY in STAR 80 (1983)

After her acclaimed performances in Manhattan and Personal Best, Mariel Hemingway was one of Hollywood's hottest young actresses. But the slender, girlish Hemingway would've been few people's ideal choice for the role of Dorothy Stratten, the ill-fated 1980 Playmate of the Year, in Bob Fosse's final directorial effort. All that changed when she received breast implants, which increased her cup size from an A to a C, the same size as Stratten's all-natural assets. Hemingway has insisted that her enlargement surgery has nothing to do with the role, but whether she did or not, it certainly made her more believable in the role. Hemingway gave one of her best performances as Stratten, but the film was largely reviled by critics and ignored by audiences, and her once-promising career faltered. Oh, Mariel — don't you know that you need to make yourself LESS alluring if you want Hollywood to love you? Star 80 has experienced a small critical resuscitation in recent years, but Hemingway, despite working steadily in the intervening decades, never managed to live up to the potential many had forecast for her. Nowadays, she's arguably as well-known for her yoga and self-help books as she is for her acting. A strange footnote in this story is the fate of her implants themselves. Following FDA warnings about silicone implants, Hemingway had hers replaced by noticeably smaller saline ones in 1993. In 2001, after one of the saline bags ruptured, they were removed altogether.



MICHAEL CAINE in EDUCATING RITA (1983)

Promoting this movie, in which he plays a middle-aged-going-on-elderly literary professor, Caine went on The Tonight Show and lamented that he had been forced to pack on the extra pounds and grow a beard for the role because it demanded that he look "unattractive." It says something about Caine's standing as an authoritative embodiment of manly cool that this remark was enough to inspire a national newspaper columnist to publish a crestfallen demand that he apologize to all bearded males. By De Niro standards, Caine's weight gain may not qualify as a jaw-dropping transformation, but because of the way Caine uses his physical equipment as an actor, it's actually one of the most effective ever caught on film. The professor is a drunk and a burnout who uses his education to keep the world at bay, and Caine uses his own flesh and hair as a metaphor for how emotionally armored he is against letting in anyone who might ultimately cause him pain. You may not realize just how effective a device it is until the final scene, after Rita (Julie Walters), the ambitious Liverpool hairdresser with whom he's bonded and who's now about to disappear from his life, forces him to let her give him a haircut and tame his unruly face fuzz. When she's done, the professor no longer looks the same, but because of the actor's deep immersion inside the character, he doesn't look quite like Michael Caine, either. 

— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw
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Posted Nov 08 2007, 04:00 PM
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