VIDEO: Movies That Seriously Damaged Actors’ Bodies

Most people think acting is easy and overpaid.

But what they don’t know is that sometimes, actors have to go through extraordinary transformations for their roles – transformations that could seriously mess with their bodies and with their health.

Actors often go through great sacrifices for our entertainment.

According to Daily Mail, Christian Bale stunned audiences when the normally athletic actor appeared a gaunt 60 pounds lighter in the psychological thriller, ‘The Machinist,’ but a co-star says the radical transformation wasn’t originally in the script.

In a recent interview, co-star Michael Ironside, said the weight loss was the result of a simple typo.

‘The writer is only about five-foot-six, and he put his own weights in,’ Ironside said. ‘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.’

In the interview with The Huffington Post, Ironside said the original role was meant for a much shorter actor.

But, he said, Bale was up for the challenge.

He said: ‘I overdid it because I was enjoying gorging. I was ignoring advice about taking it slowly because my stomach had shrunk, and I should just go with soups.

‘I was straight into pizza and ice-cream and eating five meals in a sitting. My stomach expanded really quickly. I got very sick during that time but I enjoyed getting sick. I didn’t mind it at all.

‘In that short amount of time I did actually go from 121 lbs right back up to 180 lbs which is way too fast so that resulted in some doctor visits to get things sorted out.’

Once again, the star dropped 30 lbs to play drug-addicted retired boxer Dicky Eklund in 2010’s The Fighter, but he insisted embarking on extreme weight-loss and gain for roles has never been intentional.

He told MTV News: ‘I have no goal of seeing if I can become invisible one day, eat so little that I disappear. I didn’t take this job because I went, “Oh, there’s a physical transformation needed.” I always go, “Damn! There’s a physical transformation needed!”

Severe yo-yo dieting is a regular practice in Hollywood, where extreme transformations can lead to critical acclaim.

Bale, Tom Hanks, Natalie Portman, and Matthew McConaughey are just a few to be awarded Oscars for drastic weight loss.

It’s been almost a cliche way to garner acclaim ever since Robert Deniro gained a then-record 60 pounds to play over the hill boxer Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s 1980 masterpiece, ‘Raging Bull.’

Mila Kunis about her role in “Black Swan”:

“I trained four hours a day, seven days a week, for seven months. I had one day off on my birthday and half a day off for the Emmys and the Golden Globes.

On those days my ballet instructor worked with me from 5am to 11am, then I went to hair and make-up and on to the awards shows. I lost 20lb. Aesthetically, I had to look like a ballerina and hold myself like one. By the end, I was 95lb. All you saw was bone.”