10 Actors Who Destroyed Their Bodies To Bring Characters To Life
4. Matt Damon's Weight Loss Nearly Killed Him - Courage Under Fire
From one drastic weight loss to another.
Early in his career, Matt Damon wasn't surrounded by the sort of professional nutritionalists most actors bring in when tasked with losing weight for a feature today. So, when the young actor decided he needed to lose a ton of weight for his upcoming role as solider-turned-heroin-addict Specialist Ilario in Courage Under Fire (1996) he decided to improvise.
Damon chose to run a phenomenal 13 miles a day and ate only chicken breasts. During a Reddit AMA, Damon commented on his diet, saying, 'It's not like I had a chef or anything, I just made it up and did what I thought I had to do. I just made it up and that was incredibly challenging.'
This eventually led to the actor having to take medication for a year and half in order to correct the amount of stress put on his adrenal gland. In the years since he's openly admitted that he 'went on an unsupervised diet which could have killed (him)'.
There's no doubt the role helped open doors for the young star, as this performance impressed director Francis Ford Copolla enough to offer him the lead in The Rainmaker (1997). Yet, his improvised methods very nearly had disastrous consequences.