Charlie Hunnam Starved Himself on 400 Calories a Day For His Latest Role

Gym rats and couch potatoes can agree on one thing: when it comes to losing weight, it’s no walk in the park. Hollywood actors regularly endure this daunting task when they’re forced to shrink their already perfectly fit bodies down to nothingness for roles, then snap back to their healthy forms as quickly as is humanly possible.

Charlie Hunnam is the latest victim of forced weight loss for his role in Lost City of Z, which opens Friday. Hunnam’s character is an early 20th century British explorer who makes three treks through the Amazon in search of an ancient indigenous city, and he and his costars Robert Pattinson and Edward Ashley were each required to lose about 35 pounds to demonstrate the hardship of their characters.

“We were starving, and it was incredibly humid and hot, so we didn’t have to imagine too much of the hardship those guys were enduring,” Hunnam told Yahoo Movies, saying he consumed between 400 and 500 calories a day. “On the last film that I did (a remake of the 1973 prison escape drama Papillon), I just had to lose a lot of weight again, and that was by myself,” Hunnam said. “I really missed the camaraderie of losing it with the guys.

“There was a sense that we were in it together. But then also on the underside of it, a little bit of competition… [We’d] be very suspicious of each other. When Robert would be going off and walking away, I’d have a tendency to be watching him wherever he went just to see if he was like, going off into the jungle to smuggle a quick banana or something. So we kept each other honest.”

Click through to see the extreme measures that 18 stars were willing to take for the right role.

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