Some roles are like rabbit holes: You tunnel down so deeply—learn the language, perfect the dialect, pick up new skills, dye your hair—that it can become harder and harder to tell where the character ends and you begin (or vice versa!). Here, five actors recall the commitment it took to portray some iconic characters.
Adrien Brody, “The Pianist” (2002)
“An actor’s responsibility is to do what they can to inhabit the individual that they’re playing. The more that an individual is feeling onscreen, the more truth that should emanate, and there was just so much that was necessary. You can’t act being emaciated, and that was really important to the storytelling.… So I had to do a starvation diet and I went down to 129 pounds for that role and then had to immediately gain it back because we shot in reverse chronology.… I had to learn to play good extended portions of Chopin’s Nocturnes and Ballades…and I don’t read music.… So I had to learn that through a very technical muscle memory.”
Why Actors Must ‘Go Into the Trenches’ of a Character (+ How to Do it)Jamie Foxx, “Ray” (2004)
“We tried so many different ways on making [my] eyes really look authentic and real. We [glued] the eyelids shut, which didn’t work out. We went through synthetic prosthesis, like the rubber kind, which didn’t work out. Then we found the silicone. It was tough on the eyes, but at the same time, it was necessary, because [like] in his life, it’s uncomfortable. You get angry because you can’t see. You want to take them off. I had to keep them on even during lunch, so I couldn’t see for 12 [to] 14 hours a day.”
How Do Actors Prepare for Roles?Jennifer Garner, “Peppermint” (2018)
“I was ready to go back to action. All my kids were in school and, you know, it takes so much time to just prepare for it that I felt like I finally had the bandwidth to do what I needed to do. I worked out with Body by Simone every day, and then I would have to keep training so I would do another hour and train with the stunt team and then recover. I finally felt ready for that. Also I found what I was looking for, which was a movie that took advantage of the depth of a mom’s rage. We always talk about motherhood as, like, love and happiness and joy.… But you can also be filled with a level of terror and a level of rage.”
Riz Ahmed, “Sound of Metal” (2019)
“One of the things I like most about being an actor is learning new skills and learning about new people in communities and cultures. And that’s what this job was.… I thought I’d approach the preparation in a very structured way, to be quite immersed. I stayed in the accent and with blond hair for seven months. And, you know, there are tougher things to do for seven months than walk around blond. I would do American Sign Language with Jeremy Stone, my instructor, for a couple of hours in the morning. Then I would go and work on my script with my acting coach. And then in the afternoons for a few hours, I would drum. In the evenings, I would usually go to Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings. At night, I would go to a gig. I was learning about multiple worlds at the same time: the punk and metal and noise scene, the deaf community, addiction circles. The way I like to work is just to immerse myself in it completely. So it was a long journey, but it was such an eye-opening one.”
A CD Offers 5 Tips for Getting into CharacterLady Gaga, “House of Gucci” (2021)
“I lived as [Patrizia Reggiani] for a year and a half. And I spoke with an accent for nine months of that. Off camera. I never broke. I stayed with her. It was nearly impossible for me to speak in the accent as a blonde. I instantly had to dye my hair, and I started to live in a way whereby anything that I looked at, anything that I touched, I started to take notice of where and when I could see money.”