We’ve all heard of that old Hollywood chestnut of the dreaded ‘method acting’, but what happens when actors get too close to their characters, to the point where it starts to impact their lives?

Jeremy Allen White has just admitted he felt ‘fragile’ during the making of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, in which he plays the Born To Run hitmaker.

The 34-year-old star plays the Glory Days rocker in the new biopic – which follows Bruce Springsteen amid personal and professional struggles during the making of his 1982 album Nebraska – and felt as if he needed some space to process the film’s heavy story during the production.

Jeremy told Entertainment Weekly: ‘(Springsteen) and I spoke a lot, I remember, in preparation, I had a really wonderful afternoon or evening where he took me on the Freehold tour.

‘We would text and we would call. And then once we got to set, there was like, such a… I don’t know, I felt very fragile at times.’

But this is just a drop in an ocean of instances where actors have found their state of mind – and of course, bodies (hello Hugh Jackman in Wolverine) – impacted by their work.

Here are some of the most sinister side effects of actors who take their job, arguably, a little too seriously.

Jared Leto and Heath Ledger as the Joker

It’s safe to say Jared Leto is a fan of method acting. While playing the Joker in 2016’s Suicide Squad, he got into the spirit of the role by walking onto set with a ‘dead pig’, popping the carcass on a table and leaving again.

He also played tricks on fellow actors, sending condoms to them, and he even kindly gifted Barbie’s Margot Robbie a live black rat in a box. Standard.

Of course, Jared had quite the shoes to fill, even admitting himself that Heath Ledger’s Joker was ‘one of the best performances on film’ ever.

Ledger, who had suffered with insomnia throughout his acting career, famously isolated himself for weeks to prepare to play the complex villain, penning a diary to document his character’s sinister thoughts and feelings.

In one 2017 interview with The New York Times while still filming, Ledger said he was sleeping ‘on average two hours a night’ as he ‘couldn’t stop thinking’.

Tragically, Ledger died from an accidental drug overdose of prescription medication the same year the film was released in 2008, and was posthumously honoured with an Academy Award for his role.

Despite rumours the toll the role took on Ledger’s mental health partly led to his death, his sister has since refuted claims.

At the premiere of I Am Heath Ledger at the Tribeca Film Festival, Kate Ledger said: ‘I was really shocked, because that was him having fun… Every report was coming out that he was depressed and that [the role] was taking this toll on him, and we’re going, honestly, it was the absolute opposite. It couldn’t be more wrong.

‘He had an amazing sense of humour, and I guess maybe only his family and friends knew that, but he was having fun. He wasn’t depressed about the Joker!’

Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained and The Revenant

Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t take his role as Hugh Glass in 2015 film The Revenant lightly, but he actually camped out in the wilderness, slept in animal carcasses, ate raw bison liver (despite reportedly being a vegetarian) and swam in frozen rivers to prepare for the role.

‘[I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly,’ he told Yahoo Movies at the time. He even came down with the flu multiple times while filming. However, he did use his sickness in the film: the horrific cough Leo lets out while being carried on a stretcher wasn’t acting…

Rewind three years, and Leo also went to the extremes while filming Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

During one scene as enslaver Calvin Candie, the actor slammed his hand on the table, slicing it on glass in the process. Leo continued the scene, picking shards from his actual hand without breaking character. Ouch.

Christian Bale in The Machinist

Christian Bale is the king of role transformations, and his uncharacteristically slight figure in 2004’s The Machinist is one of the wildest in film history, all done in his efforts to portray Trevor Reznick.

‘I came up with the absolutely brilliant method of just smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey to lose weight,’ Bale told Star2.com on his 60 pound weight loss for the role at the time, consuming just black coffee, one apple and a tin of tuna a day.

He told GQ of his massive weight loss later down the line: ‘I would say in hindsight that perhaps I went a little too far. Not in a way that was particularly dangerous but it certainly got, shall we say, interesting, in ways that friends and family noticed – and didn’t particularly enjoy.

‘And for me, just because you finish filming and the sets are dismantled, and you go home, it can be a difficult, long process to find your normal self again.’

Christian, who fluctuated his weight for other films in his career, said at the start of 2019: ‘I’ve become a little bit more boring now, because I’m older and I feel like if I keep doing what I’ve done in the past I’m going to die. So, I’d prefer not to die.’

Austin Butler in Elvis

Elvis’ southern drawl could be found in Austin Butler’s interviews well after he finished playing The King in the 2022 biopic. But while strange, Austin suffered far greater consequences for his determination to capture the late rockstar’s spirit.

Just a day after finishing filming, Austin was diagnosed with a virus that simulates appendicitis and spent a week bedridden.

‘I woke up at four in the morning with excruciating pain, and I was rushed to hospital,’ he explained. ‘My body just started shutting down the day after I finished Elvis.’

Chatting on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the 34-year-old actor recalled how at that time he plastered his walls with pictures of Elvis from different decades, and got a bit obsessed, to put it lightly.

‘I had these compilations of his voice I would listen to every day, his laugh, different songs,’ Austin said.

The Canadian actor spent lockdown working with voice, movement and singing coaches, the latter of which he did mostly himself in the film.

‘And then once I was allowed to leave the apartment, you know, I would usually wake up every day around 3 or 4 in the morning with this terror,’ he said.

‘It was such a daunting thing. And I really just was guided by my terror really.’ 

Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis took their roles as ballet dancers in Black Swan incredibly seriously, following restrictive diet and exercise regimes, and even sustaining major injuries while filming and carrying on regardless.

‘You’re always in some sort of pain. Something is always hurting,’ Natalie said in an interview of her time filming.

‘I dislocated a rib in the middle of filming. For the last three weeks of the film, they had to change all of the lifts so that they were carrying me under my arms – if I was touched there it literally felt like I was being stabbed. It was really, really extreme.’

She also reflected that her role as ballerina Nina Sayers – who suffers a manic perfectionism-fuelled breakdown in the psychological horror – lingered with her for a long time after.

‘I really try and distinguish pretty clearly between what’s real and what’s not,’ she reflected. ‘There are always little strands of your character that you don’t even realise are in you that linger afterwards.

‘I think because you have to internalise so much of what your character is going through in the way they think, in the way they see the world and the way they see themselves, it goes into your brain and body in ways you don’t really understand until months later.

‘This one was much harder to shake than most because it was so all-consuming.’

Daniel Day-Lewis in… everything

Daniel Day-Lewis is perhaps one of the best known method actors, and he’s absolutely earned the title.

For the screen adaptation of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, and to get into the headspace of 17th century farmer John Proctor, he reportedly lived on an isolated island for two months, even refusing to wash.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being saw Daniel learn to speak fluent Czech, and for In The Name of the Father he locked himself in solitary confinement without water for three days and lost 50 pounds for the role.

The list continues still, as in The Last of the Mohicans Daniel lived in the wilderness and learned to hunt and skin animals and fought using tomahawks.

My Left Foot saw Daniel live in a wheelchair in efforts to portray writer Christie Brown – who had cerebral palsy – playing the character off screen as well as on. He earned an Oscar for his efforts.

For The Boxer Daniel trained in the sport for a whole year with Conor McGregor’s coach Barry McGuigan, and he stepped back from acting for five years following the taxing role.

In Gangs of New York, Daniel insisted on wearing authentic period clothing throughout, and he caught pneumonia as a result.

‘I will admit that I went mad, totally mad,’ Daniel admitted for this role to The Independent, confessing it was ‘not so good for my physical or mental health’.

Daniel famously quit a 1989 production of Hamlet mid-performance and hasn’t returned to the stage since, explaining years ago that he’d seen the ‘ghost of his father’ on stage.

While he’s since denied that he saw an actual ghost, Daniel is clearly treading carefully when it comes to immersing himself too much in live theatre…

Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables

Anne Hathaway’s Oscar-winning performance as prostitute Fantine in Les Miserables profoundly affected her physically and mentally.

To portray Fantine, a mother who is forced into prostitution to provide for her daughter, Anne cut off all her hair and lost a reported 25lbs on a strict diet, which she called ‘starvation’ at the time.

Talking about her Oscars acceptance speech in 2013, Anne later reflected she wasn’t happy and felt ‘uncomfortable’ collecting the award.

‘I felt very uncomfortable,’ she told The Guardian. ‘I kind of lost my mind doing that movie and it hadn’t come back yet. Then I had to stand up in front of people and feel something I don’t feel which is uncomplicated happiness.

‘It’s an obvious thing, you win an Oscar and you’re supposed to be happy. I didn’t feel that way.

‘I felt wrong that I was standing there in a gown that cost more than some people are going to see in their lifetime and winning an award for portraying pain that still felt very much a part of our collective experience as human beings.’

Jamie Foxx in Ray

For his role as Ray Charles in the 2004 biopic about Ray Charles, Jamie Foxx’s eyes were glued shut to simulate the famed musician’s blindness.

According to The New York Times, Foxx felt so claustrophobic during the first fortnight of filming that he suffered from panic attacks, though he later won an Oscar for the role.

Physically, Jamie lost 30 pounds, and he once reflected: ‘There was a period of about four days when I was like, “What the hell is going on with my body and my mind?”‘

Adrien Brody in The Pianist  

Starring in Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning 2002 film The Pianist gave actor Adrian Brody PTSD, after the extreme lengths he went to while portraying Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman.

It was decided they would shoot the film in reverse, so for the start of filming – when he portrayed Szpilman at his most frail – Adrien had lost 13lbs, dropping his weight to 58kg.

‘That was a physical transformation that was necessary for storytelling,’ Brody said in an interview with New York Magazine’s Vulture.

‘But then that kind of opened me up, spiritually, to a depth of understanding of emptiness and hunger in a way that I didn’t know, ever.’

Six weeks before shooting, Adrien sold his apartment, his car, and put his belongings into storage. He also didn’t watch TV for at least half a year to prepare.

When asked whether felt some sort of PTSD from the experience, he responded: ‘I do, yeah.’

‘I definitely had an eating disorder for at least a year. And then I was depressed for a year, if not a lifetime. I’m kidding, I’m kidding,’ he said.

He reportedly had insomnia and panic attacks, too.

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