10 Dramatic Movie Role Transformations
There are unglamorous aspects of everyone’s job – nurses must change bed pans, schoolteachers deal with that one extra dirty kid in class, circus performers have to pause when the elephant does its business. It's nice to know that even the rich and famous have difficult days at the office. Here's a list of 10 dramatic transformations celebrities have undergone for a role, including weight gain, weight loss, and lots of prosthetics.
1. Vanessa Hudgens – Gimme Shelter
In Hollywood, an apparently adequate way to make a pretty girl look “ugly” for a role is to mess up her hair and stick eyeglasses on her. Vanessa Hudgens shows that she’s not afraid to go the extra make-under mile with her role as a pregnant teenager in Gimme Shelter. Hudgens gained 10 pounds, got a few piercings and chopped off her own hair to play a troubled teen mother. The finished product coincidentally resembles Hudgens’ Beastly costar Alex Pettyfer, neck tattoo and all. A for effort. A for unsightliness.
2. Jonah Hill – 21 Jump Street
Jonah Hill can’t win. When he was bigger and begging for goldfish platform shoes in Knocked Up, people passed him off as another “funny because he’s fat” comedian. Now that he’s lost 30 pounds for a role in the upcoming 21 Jump Street movie, Hill is the focus of numerous “was he better chubby?” polls. But either way, he’s rich and thin now. He’s laughing at all of us.
3. Charlize Theron – Monster
Through some string of logic not many can understand, the filmmakers of Monster knew that Charlize Theron was the perfect choice to play Aileen Wuornos. One is a former model, the other an an anti-model with experience in prostitution and serial killing. But after some liquid latex, fake teeth, bleached eyebrows, airbrushing and 30 extra pounds, we realized that it all shockingly worked. And then millions of Charlize fantasies were temporarily put on hold.
4. Christian Bale – The Machinist
Christian Bale lost a third of his body weight to play Trevor Reznik, a man severely suffering from insomnia in The Machinist. Bale felt that his character "should look as though he was on the brink of death" and subsequently set about losing weight by eating one apple and one can of tuna every day. The end result? 121 pounds of boniness. Because apparently when we don't get enough sleep, we all eventually look like Iggy Pop.
5. Rebecca Romijn – X Men
Rebecca Romijn as Mystique looks like how a Barbie doll would look if your destructive little brother got a hold of it – hair dipped in red paint, body covered in blue paint, and then rolled in corn flakes to look like scales. In reality, it took five women nine hours to apply Mystique's make-up in the first X-Men movie. After sitting in a makeup chair all day being covered in blue paint and nearly 100 silicone prosthetics, she ends up being pretty much naked anyway. Sucks for her, great for the rest of us.
6. Eric Stoltz – Mask
No offense to Rocky Dennis or other people with skull deformities, but don’t show this movie to young children. The premise of it will be lost and all they’ll be left with is nightmares. I don’t remember anything about this movie, but thanks to Eric Stoltz and his makeup crew, it still haunted my childhood. In order to play a boy with a rare bone disorder, Stoltz spent most of his time in heavy makeup and had to introduce himself to most of the cast at the wrap party because no one knew what he really looked like.
7. Tom Cruise – Tropic Thunder
The big surprise of this movie (other than the movie itself actually being good) is the bald-headed, fat-handed, "Low"-dancing Tom Cruise. Barely recognizable as hothead studio exec Les Grossman, Cruise successfully kept his role in the movie a secret and surprised many with his dance moves and threats to everyone else's privates. He reprised his role two years later at the 2010 MTV movie awards. Maybe the world is better with less Tom Cruise and more Les Grossman.
8. Shawn and Marlon Wayans – White Chicks
Shawn and Marlon Wayans play two black FBI agents pretending to be two white heiresses in order to protect them from being kidnapped. Ridiculous? Yes. But also awesome. Hiltonizing the Wayans brothers was a 5-hour process involving foam latex casts of their faces, full eye contact lenses and 50-gallon drums of Revlon foundation. After 60 days of filming, and over 300 hours in makeup, it makes you appreciate their performance of “A Thousand Miles” a little more.
9. Demi Moore - GI Jane/Natalie Portman - V for Vendetta
Although these two didn’t have to lose a bunch of weight or sit through hours of makeup, shaving your head is still a big deal for a woman. That is, unless you’re a pop star in the middle of a meltdown, wanting to spiral further out of public relevance. But Demi Moore and Natalie Portman are normal women, so I assume that getting a buzz cut on camera was a bit more substantial for them. I think we can all admire a woman who isn’t afraid to have her cranium on full display. Even you, Britney. Sort of.
10. Renee Zellweger – Bridget Jones's Diary
Her infamous lemon face never fails to spark hateful comments among the internet forums, but let’s give her some credit for her willingness to pack poundage not once, but twice for the Bridget Jones movies. In order to play the full-figured diarist, Zellweger gained 20 pounds by eating multiple pizzas, candy bars and peanut butter sandwiches daily. Okay, I guess we don’t have to give her that much credit; all she did was eat like an average American. You can go back to making fun of the lemon face.
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