10 Actors That Totally Overprepared For A Role
DiCaprio put it all on the line for that Best Actor Oscar.
Most actors would say that accepting a job is more than just reading a script and learning your lines. There's a certain amount of mental preparation that comes with filming something for the big screen; understanding the character that you're about to take on in order to give those words and actions on the page credibility and believability.
A few actors, however, go above and beyond when it comes to committing to the role that they're about to play. In such cases, the story behind the scenes is as mesmerising as the performance itself.
This can take the form of intense training regimes or learning new skills, which can be essential for the character. But it can also get wilder and weirder, with performers bringing themselves as close as they can to live the life of their character in order to get inside the right mindset.
Many audience members might scoff at some of the extreme lengths some actors go to prepare for a shoot, and there are certainly examples that should raise eyebrows, but often times the results speak for themselves. There is method in the madness of method acting to a supreme degree.
10. Keanu Reeves Worked On Book Binding Skills - John Wick
Being an actor is not just playing pretend and reading scripts. Depending on the projects you work on, you’ll almost certainly be asked to do things you’ve never done before. That isn’t just limited to learning different martial arts and doing death-defying stunts. Sometimes you get to learn a new hobby.
In an interview with Uproxx, Keanu Reeves was asked what he thought the character of professional assassin John Wick did in his free-time to which the star immediately had the answer: he binds books. He was so sure of this in fact because scenes of such had been shot for the first Wick film but had been omitted from the final runtime. In fact, you can still see book binding apparatus in his house in the movie.
What Reeves neglects to mention here, but can be seen in behind the scenes material, is that he actively learned how to bind books so he could do it on-screen. This is hardly a simple process, so it’s both an impressive and unfortunate level of commitment considering it was ultimately cut from the picture.
It’s fair to say most of us wouldn’t know legitimate book binding if we saw it so they could’ve just as easily have shot around this. But Keanu, ever lustful for the creative process and trying new things, jumped into the skill with both feet.
What a guy.