9 Completely Pointless Preparations By Method Actors

7. Min-Sik Choi Refused Prosthetics, Branded Himself For Real In Oldboy

It could be argued that Min-sik Choi's most famous bit of Oldboy methoding - his eating live octopus (or multiple octopuses - there was more than one take after all) - could only ever have been done the one way: by eating the creature for real. So what you see in the final film is what you get - actor Min-sik Choi chowing on raw octopode. Did Choi really have to brand his own flesh for the film, though? Probably not, but that didn't stop the actor taking a hot wire to his skin for one scene in Park Chan-wook's revenge classic, in which Choi's Dae-su elects to tattoo himself. Just like when Shia LaBeouf insisted on cutting his own face and pulling his own tooth out for Fury, there was another, easier course of action that could've been taken by Choi. Prosthetics, for example - those are the things that filmmakers traditionally use to fake injuries like Choi's flesh-scalding body disfiguration.