10 Actors Who Put Themselves Through Hell For Upcoming Movies

Kumail Nanjiani cut out carbs and sugar for an entire year to get ripped for Eternals.

By Jack Pooley /

Instagram: Kumail Nanjiani

Easy though it is to look at acting as privileged people being paid millions of dollars to play pretend, it's obviously so much more than that. Getting into character, staying there, and leaving a thoroughly convinced audience moved or entertained is no easy feat.

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And this often spans far beyond simply memorising the lines and performing them in a compelling way on set - actors sometimes have to put themselves through immense physical and mental rigours to deliver the work that ends up on screens worldwide.

Perhaps they spent almost half their waking day sat in the makeup chair, or subjected themselves to weeks, even months of training in order to perform daunting feats on-screen.

Maybe they got hurt on set, or maybe they just had to give up pizza and cake for an entire damn year. Yikes.

While it remains to be seen whether all this hard work will truly pay off or not, you can't fault the actors' commitment to these parts whatsoever.

They certainly deserve all the success in the world, so hopefully the end result translates that graft to paying audiences...

10. Stellan Skarsgård Spent EIGHT HOURS A Day In Makeup - Dune

The primary antagonist in Denis Villeneuve much-anticipated adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi opus Dune - the first half of it, at least - is the grotesque Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, as will be played by Stellan Skarsgård.

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Considering that the character in the novel is so absurdly overweight that anti-gravity devices are required to support him, it's little surprise that the not-remotely-obese Skarsgård had to sit in the makeup chair to be transformed into the Baron.

While it's not unheard of for actors to spend two, three, or four hours in makeup for drastic alterations to their appearance, Skarsgård ended up spending a patience-testing eight hours per shooting day getting makeup and prosthetics applied.

Thankfully for Skarsgård, the Baron's role in the movie is relatively small, and so he only needed to go through the process ten times.

Even so, that amounts to 80 hours - more than three entire days! - getting slap applied to his face and body, a process which could surely drive even the most perfectly sane person nuts.

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