9 Actors Who Were Deeply Affected by That One Role
Performing in front of a camera is a tiring job, irrespective of how it looks from the outside. Being an actor requires as much research and practice as talent. The preparation for a role doesn’t begin on the shoot date but days, months, or even years before the filming.
Some career-defining performances require large emotional and physical investments that leave a lasting impression on the actor playing them. These impressions can lead to spiritual epiphanies, career growth, or even personal growth, but others can be extremely taxing on the body. Let’s travel over such actors who were never the same after that one role.
1. Dakota Johnson: Suzy Bannion in Suspiria (2018)
Dakota Johnson plays Suzy Bannion in Luca Guadagnino’s haunting, psychological remake, Suspiria. Suzy is a dancer who gets into a sinister Berlin ballet academy, and for her role, Dakota Johnson undertook a six-month intensive choreographic training.
Even before the filming began, Johnson had started studying German expressionist books, coupled with hours of dance training with Damien Jalet. Even as filming the last installment of Fifty Shades of Grey, she would dedicate time to the dance studio for further training. The amount of work led to extreme exhaustion and injuries, forcing her to step out of her comfort zone and dedicate herself fully to the craft. In a W magazine interview, she reflects on the pain and pleasure of shooting Suspiria.
2. Bob Hoskins: Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
For Bob Hoskins’s iconic role as Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the process was unique, even by today’s standards.
For almost eight months of the shoot, Hoskins had to act alongside nothing but an imaginary cartoon. He had to mime and react to lines projected at him from behind the camera. In the years following the film, Hoskins would still see and hear those cartoon voices in his head and had to capture a break from movies. A Express article quotes Hoskins saying, “I had trained myself to hallucinate, and it screwed up my brain.”
3. Colin Firth: King George VI in The King’s Speech (2010)
Colin Firth plays the future King of England, George VI, in the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech. In the movie, his character has to give a number of speeches along with other royal duties, but a near-debilitating stammer ruins every speech until he hires a vocal coach to train him.
For his role, Colin worked with his own voice coach and studied tapes of George’s mannerisms and nervous tics in stammering. He immersed himself in the role so much that he admitted in an interview that he occasionally stammered in normal conversations after filming ended. The repeated practice of the physical gesture became infectious; he noticed an involuntary lapse in his speeches. The tic wore off.
4. Adrien Brody: Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist (2002)
Adrien Brody’s physical transformation for The Pianist is obvious, but the actor has frequently discussed the enormous mental and emotional toll of portraying a Holocaust survivor, which also earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor in 2003.
To prepare for his role, Brody gave up his apartment, sold his car, left his phone, and moved to Europe. But the biggest challenge he had to deal with was extreme hunger following his little to no diet, which put emotional strain on him. He did it to understand the desperation that comes with hunger, and it was unlike anything he ever felt. This intense experience took him a while to settle back in and regain his normalcy, but the actor embraced what was required of the character.
5. Janet Leigh: Marion Crane in Psycho (1960)
Academy Award-winning actress Janet Leigh is mainly known for one role: playing a character who gets stabbed to death in the famous shower scene early on in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
The scene was so well shot and cut that it terrified the audience and also Janet Leigh herself. After the scene, she never felt comfortable in a shower again. According to a 1984 interview with one of the writers of Woman’sWorld, Leigh said she stopped taking showers after watching the scene.
6. Bill Skarskård: Pennywise in It (2017)
Bill Skarsgård gave a mind-blowing performance as the horrifying Pennywise in It.
Bill used to think about the eerie clown’s mannerisms and more delicate nuances on set and off set. So much so that he got into the skin of Pennywise, and after the movie ended, he couldn’t shake the clown off for a long time. He used to dream of Pennywise, and sometimes they would be together in a nightmare. Bill called it a destructive relationship.
7. Shelley Duvall: Wendy Torrance in The Shining (1980)
Director Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is an intense watch. Shelley Duvall actually was at a breaking point throughout the shoot.
Her character needed to cry a lot and remain in a state of paranoia and continuous fatigue, which itself is a taxing act. Kubrick was relentless in getting the performance he wanted for his vision, which seemed like torture for Shelley. During a 1980 interview with Roger Ebert, she called the whole experience “unbearable.”
8. Isabelle Adjani: Anna in Possession (1981)
Isabelle Adjani won a César Award for her performance in Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 Possession, but the intense physical and emotional demands of her role took a toll on her.
Adjani later told in an interview with IndieWire that it took years of therapy to get Anna out of her system, and she would never attempt any role as draining as Anna in Possession.
9. Heath Ledger: The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008)
Heath Ledger went all in for his iconic role as the Joker in The Dark Knight. For his preparation, Heath used unusual methods—isolating himself in an apartment, sleeping only two hours, and discovering the voice of the Joker. It was highly psychological, and he used to maintain a diary for it.
He devoted most of the time to comic books and his own thoughts, trying to crack the characters’ laughs and mannerisms. Ledger remains immortal with his groundbreaking performance as the Joker.
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