10 Actors Who Made Insane Sacrifices For Movies (And Why)

The annals of Hollywood are littered with legendary stories of actors suffering for their craft, and it's clear that many performers take an almost fetishistic pleasure in putting themselves through hell for the sake of getting into character (or at least, having a good story to tell the Academy).

Method acting certainly isn't a practice for everyone, though - Laurence Olivier famously said to a method-loving Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, "Why don’t you just try acting?"

Yet sometimes actors will go much further than the broad strokes of "The Method", demolishing their bodies and minds for a very specific reason, be it to better their performance, fulfil one of their specific acting quirks or maybe even net themselves a larger payday.

In each case, these actors voluntarily made their jobs harder than they needed to be, whether for the sake of themselves or the audience.

The results speak for themselves, though, and whatever you make of these excessive feats of actorly self-flagellation, the performances have stood the test of time wonderfully...