10 Actors That Totally Overprepared For A Role

Shia LeBeouf is known for extreme method acting, and when he signed up to be a part of David Ayer’s flick about American tank operators during the final weeks of World War II, things were no different.

As LeBeouf recalls it, Ayer demanded the actors “give him everything” for Fury right off the bat and thus the actor decided to take things into his own hands. A day after signing the contract, LaBeouf voluntarily joined the US National Guard and spent a month living on a forward operating base.

It only got more intense from there. When pre-production began, he decided to cut up his own face, forcibly remove a tooth and didn’t bathe for four months. He knew what he was getting into with Ayer, who put his cast through an intense boot camp designed to make them fight each other both verbally and physically. Being forced to live in a tank together for extended periods of time, eating, sleeping and defecating in the same spaces, sounds bad enough but LeBeouf was already steps ahead with his own self-imposed gruelling experiences.

Fury is a bleak look at the realities of war and the impact it has on the souls of men, and it sounds like Shia LeBeouf brought himself as close to hell as he could manage to get into the film’s mindset.