The role Ryan Gosling changed his body for: “I was fat and unemployed”
Method acting isn’t endorsed by every thespian, but sometimes weight gain is a necessity. Prosthetics can always help, but Ryan Gosling opted to take a different approach to bulking up as fast as he could.
There’s no easy way to pile on the pounds without running the risk of health benefits, and he was hardly the first to start binge eating like there was no tomorrow. As mentioned, though, it can often come with unwanted side effects that linger long after the cameras stop rolling.
Unsurprisingly, Jared Leto found that out for himself when he started devouring microwaved ice cream spiked with soy sauce and olive oil to gain 67 pounds in order to play John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, in Chapter 27. It ended up giving him a bad case of gout, necessitating the use of a wheelchair after his body was placed under the extra stress of its heftier frame.
On the plus side, as terrible as Leto’s film turned out to be, at least people got to see the effort he’d put in. Gosling, on the other hand, decided that he was going to take it upon himself to increase his own mass by 60 pounds without consulting with the project’s director beforehand, which led to a morbidly hilarious outcome.
Even though he was only in his late 20s at the time, Gosling was cast by Peter Jackson to play the suburban father of two teenage girls in the literary adaptation The Lovely Bones. Deciding that he needed to reinvent himself in order to be more convincing, it was time for the star to attack the fats, carbs, and sugars like there was no tomorrow.
“I was 150 pounds when he hired me, and I showed up on set 210 pounds. We had a different idea of how the character should look,” he explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “I really believed he should be 210 pounds. I was melting Haagen Dazs and drinking it when I was thirsty. We didn’t talk very much during the pre-production process, which was the problem.”
That’s understating it when The Lord of the Rings director had no idea Gosling was going to rock up completely out of shape, leading the Barbie favourite to admit, “I had gotten it wrong.” So wrong, in fact, that it was decided his services were no longer required, with The Lovely Bones booting him completely and drafting in Mark Wahlberg at the last minute to play Jack Salmon.
Having gone to all that effort in pounding ice cream with such reckless abandon, what did Gosling have to show for it? Absolutely nothing, except an intense fitness regimen to pick up after it struck him that immediately after being dropped from the film, “then I was fat and unemployed”.
