Pump You Up! How the Stars of Bronson and Other Flicks Got Ripped for Their Action Close-Ups

Share on Facebook posted 10-06-09 by craigmacnee

In 1974, a 19-year-old hothead named Michael Peterson decided he wanted to make a name for himself, and so, armed with a homemade sawn-off shotgun, he waltzed into a local post office and stole £26.18 (about $50). Peterson was eventually imprisoned for seven years, but has actually now been behind bars for 34 years, 30 of which have been spent in solitary confinement (his sentence has been repeatedly extended for crimes committed within prison, which include wounding, wounding with intent, criminal damage, grievous bodily harm, false imprisonment, blackmail and threatening to kill). His dangerous behavior has meant that he has spent time in over 120 different prisons, including the Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital. During his incarceration, Petersen changed his name to Charles Bronson.

I just watchedBronson, the movie about this man, which had a limited release in the U.S. this past October, and it suddenly dawned on me that the brute playing the title character is the actor Tom Hardy, who many may remember as the lithe “Handsome Bob” in Guy Ritchie’s crime caper RockNRolla.

Got me wondering about some of the biggest weight gains achieved by actors for a given role …

BEFORE

Tom Hardy in ROCKNROLLA

AFTER

Tom Hardy in BRONSON

So how does one go about putting on 42lbs of muscle in less than 5 weeks?

“I had five weeks to make the transition into Britain’s most dangerous criminal and it was a race against the clock: We didn’t have any time to waste, so I started eating and my arse very quickly got very fat. For Bronson, I put on about 7lbs a week — with no steroids. In the end I’d put on about 2 and a half stone by eating chicken and rice, which was my staple diet throughout the day. Then I’d have a pizza, Häagen-Dazs and Coca-Cola: So not good stuff, but I had to put weight on. I needed to put a layer of fat on my body, because Bronson when he was younger was a big guy, a brawler. My diet was lenient as we weren’t going for the Bruce Lee look and we weren’t looking for the cut.”

“My approach was to do a lot of repetitions in order to send messages to my muscles: this helps them start to grow in a way that you can’t make them in the gym. To achieve dense muscle, you need a specific kind of training. Also, to “become” Charlie Bronson I had to quickly put a lot of weight quickly on my forearms, chest and neck. By the time I’d finished, my legs looked like those of a stork in comparison to the top half of my body.”

BEFORE

Gerard Butler in PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

AFTER

Gerard Butler in 300

To physically prepare them for the rigors of the demanding fight sequences, Snyder enlisted Mark Twight, a former world record-holding professional mountain climber, to train the actors and stuntmen in physical fitness conditioning. With a background training special operations military personnel, cage fighters, and mountain climbers, Twight’s approach included a strict dietary plan of calorie restriction combined with a brutal regimen of physical activity.

“For eight weeks prior to the start of production, Twight challenged the men to go beyond their normal limits. To support fight preparation the training emphasized athleticism by combining compound movements, lifting, and throwing. Primitive tools – medicine balls, Kettlebells, rings – were used instead of machines. Each session was competitive, with a penalty-reward system tied to performance and results posted daily for all to see.”[www.gymjones.com ]

BEFORE

Christian Bale in THE MACHINIST

Christian Bale starved himself for over four months prior to filming, as his character needed to look drastically thin, surviving on one cup of coffee and an apple (or a can of tuna) each day (approximately 275 calories). According to the DVD commentary, he lost 62 pounds (28 kg), reducing his body weight to 120 pounds (54.4 kg). Bale wanted to go down to 100 pounds (45.3 kg) but the filmmakers would not let him due to health concerns.

AFTER

Christian Bale in BATMAN BEGINS

Fresh from The Machinist, Bale obviously needed to bulk up to fill Batman’s suit, recalls Bale: “…when it actually came to building muscle, I was useless. I couldn’t do one push up the first day. All of the muscles were gone, so I had a real tough time rebuilding all of that.” He was given a deadline of six months to do this. With the help of a personal trainer, Bale succeeded in meeting the deadline, gaining a total of 100 lb in six months. He went from about 130 lbs to 230 lbs. However, he’d actually gained more weight than the director desired, and then had to drop his weight to 190 lbs by the time filming began.

BEFORE

FIT Robert De Niro in RAGING BULL

Jake LaMotta served as De Niro’s trainer accompanied by Al Silvani as his coach. The actor found that boxing came naturally to him; he entered as a middleweight boxer, winning two of his three fights in a Brooklyn ring dubbed “young LaMotta” by the commentator. According to Jake LaMotta, he felt that De Niro was one of his top 20 best middleweight boxers of all time.

AFTER

FAT Robert De Niro in RAGING BULL

According to Scorsese, production of the film was closed down for around four months after shooting the fighting scenes, with the entire crew still being paid, so De Niro could go on a binge eating trip around Northern Italy and France. When he did come back to the United States, his weight had increased from 145 to 215 pounds.

BEFORE

TAYLOR LAUTNER in 2003

Taylor Lautner, perhaps now best knwon for his role in the Twilight franchise is an accomplished martial artist, having studied karate from the age of six to thirteen. When he was eleven, he was ranked number one in the world for NASKA’s Black Belt Open Forms, Musical Weapons, Traditional Weapons and Traditional Forms and, at the age of twelve, he won the Junior World Championships. Bit of a lightweight though.

AFTER

TAYLOR LAUTNER in 2009

For New Moon the role required Taylor to bulk up and he apparently put on 30 pounds. A fact he seems the definition of smug about.

54 YEAR OLD!!!

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER in TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES

Arnie has always been a big guy so what is unbelievably impressive is not his weight transformation but actually the opposite. How did manage to maintain his muscle so that he still looked ripped as a 54 year old in Terminator 3— nineteen years after The Terminator and 12 years after its sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. He signed the deal to reprise his most famous role in November 2001 and, with filming not scheduled to begin until early April 2002, he was confident he had sufficient time to get into the sort of shape he wanted. But then, in early December, he broke six ribs in a motorcycle accident and couldn’t train for three months. Furthermore, he had underwent heart valve replacement surgery in 1997 and since this operation, his doctors had told him that it would no longer be wise to indulge in all-out workouts using really heavy weights. They advised high-rep work, never going beyond failure. Which meant he couldn’t train the way he used to.

Instead, he trained twice a day, six days a week, doing, for the most part, 15 sets a body part. Heeding the advice of his heart surgeon, he didn’t lift maximum poundages, do forced reps or any other intensity techniques. Instead, he did high-rep sets to failure and took short rests between sets. And the results: scary. Guess that’s why he got paid a reported $30 million for the movie.