Gym rats and couch potatoes can agree on one thing: when it comes to losing weight, it’s no walk in the park. Hollywood actors regularly endure this daunting task when they’re forced to shrink their already perfectly fit bodies down to nothingness for roles, then snap back to their healthy forms as quickly as is humanly possible. Charlie Hunnam is the latest victim of forced weight loss for his role in Lost City of Z, which opens Friday. Hunnam’s character is an early 20th century British explorer who makes three treks through the Amazon in search of an ancient indigenous city, and he and his costars Robert Pattinson and Edward Ashley were each required to lose about 35 pounds to demonstrate the hardship of their characters. “We were starving, and it was incredibly humid and hot, so we didn’t have to imagine too much of the hardship those guys were enduring,” Hunnam told Yahoo Movies, saying he consumed between 400 and 500 calories a day. “On the last film that I did (a remake of the 1973 prison escape drama Papillon), I just had to lose a lot of weight again, and that was by myself,” Hunnam said. “I really missed the camaraderie of losing it with the guys. “There was a sense that we were in it together. But then also on the underside of it, a little bit of competition… [We’d] be very suspicious of each other. When Robert would be going off and walking away, I’d have a tendency to be watching him wherever he went just to see if he was like, going off into the jungle to smuggle a quick banana or something. So we kept each other honest.” Click through to see the extreme measures that 18 stars were willing to take for the right role. Read more from Yahoo Beauty + Style: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyle and@YahooBeauty. Charlie Hunnam Hunnam lost some 35 pounds for his role in Lost City of Z, in which he plays an early 20th century British Explorer trekking thrice through the Amazon in search of an ancient city. “We were starving, and it was incredibly humid and hot, so we didn’t have to imagine too much of the hardship those guys were enduring,” Hunnam told Yahoo Movies, saying he consumed between 400 and 500 calories a day. He found it easier to lose weight for this film than his last, Papillon, because he did it alongside costars Robert Pattinson and Edward Ashley. “There was a sense that we were in it together. But then also on the underside of it, a little bit of competition… So we kept each other honest.” Adam Driver Driver said that his extreme weight loss was helpful to his“process” as an actor while playing a 17th century Jesuit Priest alongside Andrew Garfield in Martin Scorsese’s Silence."You’re so hungry and so tired at some points that there’s nothing you can do — you’re not adding anything on top of what you’re doing. You only have enough energy to convey what you’re doing, so it’s great," Driver told Interview Magazine. "I can't control what's happening in scenes, but I could control when I ate food. And that visual part of the storytelling, I don't think I've ever taken it to the extreme before." (Photos: Paramount Pictures/Getty Images) Liam Hemsworth “I didn’t eat for weeks,” the 26-year-old toldE! Newsof his latest role inThe Dressmaker.“I could actually hear his stomach growling,” his co-star, Kate Winslet, added. Hemsworth admitted that getting used to a new body isn’t easy. “I did some pushups in my trailer,” he said. “Anytime you’re going to come out and take your top off, it’s good to do a couple of pushups… It’s very difficult to come out and just take your clothes off.” (Photos: Everett/Universal Pictures) Matt Damon in Courage Under Fire in a Reddit ask me anything, Matt Damon laid out the exceptional difficulty of extreme weight loss and yoyo dieting (that pretty much comes with the territory of winning an Oscar). “I think the most challenging role that I've ever had was when I did Courage Under Fire and I had to lose all the weight that I lost on my own, that was the most physically challenging [thing] I've ever had to do in my life,” Damon wrote. “I weigh probably 190 pounds right now, and I weighed 139 in that movie, and that is not a natural weight for me and not a happy weight for me even when I was 25. So, you know, to do that I had to run about 13 miles a day, which wasn't even the hard part. The hard part was the diet. All I ate was chicken breast. 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.” (Photos: Everett/Getty) Beyonce in Dreamgirls To prep for her role as Deena in Dreamgirls, Beyoncé lost 20 pounds on her own accord. "I figured in the '60s Twiggy was the hot model, and Diana [Ross] and Cher and all the legends were thinner than I am," she told Oprah. "So I decided I wanted to lose weight and make a physical transformation. And it was difficult because I love food. I love to eat. I did a fast—a master cleanser for 14 days. Everybody was eating Krispy Kremes around me. I was grouchy, but I did it and I lost the weight." (Photos: Everett/Getty) Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada Emily Blunt shed a few pounds for her role in The Devil Wears Prada, but she doesn’t want young girls to think they should look like she did in the film. “I am from a family of thin children, so I have always been OK with that. I’ve only lost weight for The Devil Wears Prada and that was because my character was supposed to be on the edge of anorexia,” she told Parade. “But I think the pressure is so huge on young girls right now to lose weight and it needs to diminish. It is becoming worrying how many super thin girls we see walking around, and they are so obviously ill. It is kind of accepted and it is glamorized more than it should be.”(Photos: Everett/Getty) Chris Hemsworth in Lost at Sea "Just tried a new diet/training program called 'Lost At Sea.' Wouldn't recommend it,” Hemsworth tweeted. He detailed his staggering weight loss in an interview with Men’s Health. “We couldn't go away for a month and get skinny, we had to do it while we were shooting,' he says. 'At one point, a day's rations were a boiled egg, a couple of crackers and a celery stick.” Hemsworth happily got back to his brolic Thor figure after filming was over. “To get back to looking like Thor is simple: I get in the gym and work out,” he says. “I enjoy it. It keeps me fit and healthy. I've got to eat more calories – certain types and all clean – and it can get boring eating chicken breast and rice and so on. But at least you're fed properly.” (Photos: Instagram/Getty) Amanda Seyfried in Chloe Seyfried slimmed down for her role as an expensive call girl. "I'm on a raw-food diet," she told Esquire. "It's intense. And sort of awful. Yesterday for lunch? Spinach. Just spinach. Spinach and some seeds." But to her, Hollywood’s pressure to be thin is nothing more than doing her job. “I looked way better when I was 15," Seyfried told Ellen DeGeneres. "I had huge breasts, and then I came to Hollywood and I was like 'I got to lose weight. I got to look thin and fit,' and I lost them a little bit. They were quite uncomfortable, but they look beautiful. I was feminine. I had some nice curves and I think that we should really appreciate that as opposed to trying to get rid of everything." (Photos: Everett/Getty) Christian Bale in The Machinist Christian Bale famously dropped more than 60 pounds for his role in The Machinist, weighing in at a staggering 122 lbs at 6 feet tall. “The writer is only about five-foot-six, and he put his own weights in,” Bale’s co-star Michael Ironside told Huffington Post of the mixup in the weight Bale was expected to meet. “And then Chris did the film and Chris said, ‘No, don’t change the weights. I want to see if I make them.’ ... So those weights he writes on the bathroom wall in the film are his actual weights in the film.” (Photos: Everett/Getty) Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables To portray a dying prostitute in Les Mis, Anne Hathaway had to shed the muscle she put on for her role as Catwoman and drop 25 pounds in merely a month. “I lost the first 10 (pounds) in three weeks through a detox and then I lost the subsequent 15 in 14 days by doing food deprivation and exercise, which I don’t recommend,” she told SF Gate. “I know when I was a teenage girl … I would try crazy things and I do not recommend anyone do this at all. I was under the supervision of a nutritionist and I had a doctor monitoring me, but it’s not fun. You can be too thin.” (Photos: Everett/Getty) Tom Hanks in Castaway Hanks shed 50 pounds to portray a character stuck on a deserted island, and he looked to his character’s surroundings for a painfully realistic weight loss. ”You know coconuts? Think you can eat a lot of coconuts? Well, let me tell you, it’s a natural laxative,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “So just put two and two together there. Take a coconut, drink all the milk out of it, and then eat all the insides, and you tell me how you feel after an hour and a half…” (Photos: Everett/Getty) Mila Kunis in Black Swan "I had to look skinny in order to look like a ballerina," she said on a SiriusXM interview with Howard Stern. "You fake it. So, the best way to fake it is to unfortunately look like it." Kunis weighed in at 95lbs during the film and trained in ballet for three months to fake it as best she could. "I never watched what I ate [before]. It was one of those things, for the first time in my life, I got a food delivery service," she said. "And I'll tell you this, I'm not promoting this at all, but I used to be a smoker, and so I smoked a lot of cigarettes and I ate a limited amount of calories. 1,200 calories and I smoked. I don't advocate this at all. It was awful.” (Photos: Everett/Getty) Natalie Portman in Black Swan Natalie Portman lost 20 pounds over six months on a 1,200 calorie vegan diet for her role as Nina. "At a certain point I looked at [Natalie's] back and she was so skinny and so cut — I was like, 'Natalie, start eating,' I made sure she had a bunch of food in her trailer,” director Darren Aronofsky told Popsugar. (Photos: Everett/Getty) 50 Cent in Things Fall Apart To play his best friend who died of cancer, 50 Cent dropped from 214 pounds to 160 in nine weeks following a liquid diet and running on a treadmill three hours a day. It was an emotional process for him, and not an entirely unfamiliar one. When he was shot in the jaw in 2000, he could only drink liquids and his weight plummeted to 157. “This time it was a lot tougher for me,” he told AP. “I had to discipline myself not ... to actually have myself be in the physical state to convey the energy I felt. It’s a passion project for me.” (Photos: Instagram/Getty) Rooney Mara in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo To play the “pale, anorexic” Lisbeth Salander, Mara kickboxed with a trainer. She didn’t discuss her diet, but an interview with Vogue made it seem like eating, or lack thereof, played a significant role in preparing for the film. “’You can eat.’ I look up to see her reaction. Mara rolls her eyes, and Fincher laughs. ‘You can have lettuce and a grape. A raisin if you must.’ She orders a piece of fish and barely touches it… I ask if she had to get unhealthily skinny for the role. She says, ‘Umm . . . not really.’ ‘It hasn’t been too hard for her,’ Fincher quickly adds.” (Photos: Everett/Getty) Jared Leto in The Dallas Buyers Club To play a trans AIDS sufferer, Leto lost 38 pounds. “I got down to 116 or something. I just basically didn't eat. I ate very little,” he told E Online. “I had done similar things with weight, but this was different, I think the role demanded that commitment... It was about how does that effect how I walk, how I talked, who I am, how I feel. You know, you feel very fragile and delicate and unsafe.” The role took a major toll on his health.“Your organs [and] muscles shrink, your organs shrink [and] my stomach has shrunk as well. I'm doing cardio but I'll tell you what, the more I've learned is - and I think it comes with age too - is it's 90 percent diet. It's a matter of how much I eat or how little I eat.” (Photos: Splash/Getty) Matthew McConnaughey in The Dallas Buyer’s Club McConnaughey’s character was also a victim of AIDS, and he lost 50lbs for the role. He consulted the shapeshifting master, Tom Hanks, as well as a nutritionist before embarking on his weight loss. Starting at 185lbs, he thought he would stop at 145, but he didn’t feel it was enough. "I was going around and people were going, 'Hey, are you feeling all right?" McConaughey told People of reaching his initial goal. "But then I hit 135 lbs. I ran in to somebody and they didn't just ask if I was all right, they said, 'My God, we need to get you some help.' And I thought, 'There we go. That's the perfect spot.' " He ate good foods, but not much of them and found himself “uncontainable with energy,” needing to sleep three hours less each night. “I found through this journey that the human body is much more resilient than we give it credit for.” (Photos: Splash/Getty) Jennifer Hudson in Winnie Mandela Jennifer Hudson starred as Winnie Mandela and went from a size 16 to a 6 for the role. "Whatever it takes to morph into a character I'll do it,” she told People. “I’m in the best shape of my life!” Hudson enlisted the help of celebrity trainer Harley Pasternak, and got her start on Weight Watchers. (Photos: Everett/Getty)
See Also
Cafe on the grounds of former Romford tattoo parlour bids to serve alcohol - Hammersmith and Fulham news - NewsLocker20 Famous Blonde Actors7 Things About Jax and Tara That Make No SenseHow old was Helen McCarthy in Jungleland?