10 Weird Ways That Actors Coped With Difficult Shoots

6. Arnie Drinks Schnapps in the Jungle

The Revenant
20th Century Fox

Shooting Predator was quite an experience for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Over the course of the production, he had a gym shipped to Mexico, got married and got food poisoning, requiring him to shoot one scene with an IV connected to his arm. It's not surprising that the actor eventually hit the bottle!

The schnapps that the Austrian action star drank was purely medicinal, however. Given the drastic drop in temperature in the Mexican jungle, night shoots proved particularly difficult to film. This was exacerbated by the amount of time that Schwarzenegger spent in freezing cold water. Not only that, but the mud that Dutch smears on his face was actually pottery clay, which showed up better on the cameras but also got incredibly cold and wet.

As his character spent much of the film in camouflage, Arnie had to wear this uncomfortably cold clay for weeks. Whilst the production team focused heat lamps on the action star, it still wasn't enough to stop him shivering. So, like all good Austrians, Schwarzenegger turned to his national drink to restore a bit of heat to his body.

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Citizen of the Universe, Film Programmer, Writer, Podcaster, Doctor Who fan and a gentleman to boot. As passionate about Chinese social-realist epics as I am about dumb popcorn movies.