I’ve heard a few times about how, for the movie Vampire’s Kiss, Nicholas Cage had two teeth extracted and ate live cockroaches on film, and no doubt has done a host of other bizarre things for his art over the years.
Benicio Del Turo burned the insides of his wrists with cigarettes several times (leading to an infection), along with gaining 50 pounds, to play Oscar Acosta in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. His costar, Johnny Depp, allowed Hunter S Thompson to shave his head with a straight razor - which, depending on what Hunter had imbibed that day, might have been the more insane method acting choice.
Brown Bunny star Chloe Sevigny…well, if you don’t remember what she did, just google her. But not at work.
And then there’s Devine and the dog shit.
I’m sure there’s dozens of examples I’ve forgotten, or don’t know.
“Fear & Loathing…” was one of the few movies that I have ever got up and walked out of the theater on, (I thought the 45 minutes of it that I stayed for was torture) but I know the book quite well, and I am wondering if you can recall the scene in which this happened, as I can’t remember anything like that happening in the novel…
That said, I don’t know if I could put a lit cigarette out on my wrist for $10,000 in cash, as a bad burn hurts me more than any other kind of wound or pain.
I would much rather have a tooth pulled with no Novocaine than willingly get a severe burn…
Ditto this. And he didn’t look much meatier in “The Fighter” either.
I thought Natalie Portman shaving her head for “V for Vendetta” was pretty bold but I think as far as women’s roles go, Renee Zellweger gaining however much weight for “Bridget Jone’s Diary” was damned gutsy considering being an overweight woman anywhere is practically a capital offense, nevermind Hollywood.
Sevigny is not the first (or last) actress to have sex in a mainstream movie. Raffaela Anderson, Gry Bay, Maruschka Detmers, Caroline Ducey, Kerry Fox, Karen Lancaume, Sook-Yin Lee, and Margo Stilley have all performed sexual acts on camera.
It wasn’t a scene in the movie. Oscar Acosta had the scars on his wrists in real life, so Del Turo scarred himself off camera (as opposed to using a make up artist, for some reason), and the burns ended up infected.
And Chloe Sevigny was also, at the time, dating the director of the film, Vincent Gallo, and he was the person that Sevigny was with in the scene/scenes, so I would assume that made it at least a tiny bit easier for her to “perform.”
Actually she had dated the director in the past but they weren’t a couple when she did that scene. But, she’s a bit of a slut- a mean master thespian!- and didn’t find it to be a big deal.
When Sean Penn was preparing for one of his very first roles, Bad Boys, he and the director were out together and Penn wanted to actually commit a purse snatching to ‘get into the role’. The director talked him out of it. Kind of shows you that, although he is a great actor, he’s also always been a selfish, narcissistic, pretentious asshole…
Martin Sheen sliced his arm open in that scene from Apocalypse Now where he broke the mirror. That was all his blood. (He also had a heart attack during filming; however Coppala neglected to include this in the final print.)
Madonna in Dangerous Game. You can tell, to the second, when she realizes that Harvey Keitel isn’t in character talking to her character, that he is actually slagging her, personally, for being “commercial trash” and not a serious actress in independent films. She doesn’t break character or storm off, and she does go on to make 8 more movies (with another two apparently in the pipeline), but watching this feels like creepy voyeurism.
When Winona Ryder was pinched for shoplifting, she initially claimed that she did it in preparation for a role in Shop Girl, the Steve Martin movie that ultimately starred Claire Danes. I think she backed off that claim pretty quick.
