The Body as Material

In 2004 Christian Bale appeared in The Machinist, a low-budget psychological thriller about a factory worker who has not slept for a year.

To play him, Bale lost a large amount of weight. The figure usually given is that he reached around 120 pounds, which on a man of his height left visible ribs, a hollowed face and arms like cords. By his own account he lived on almost nothing for months. The film was not a hit, but the photographs of him in it went everywhere.

What happened next is the part that should give anybody pause. Within months he was cast as Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, released in 2005, and he had to become a muscular action hero on a production schedule. He did. The usual story adds that he overshot and arrived heavier than the director wanted; that comes from interviews and is probably polished, but the basic arc, from emaciated to powerful in less than a year, is a matter of record. Years later he gained weight again to play Dick Cheney in Vice, released in 2018.

Charlize Theron made the same kind of change in the opposite direction. To play Aileen Wuornos, the serial killer executed in Florida in 2002, in Monster, released in 2003, she gained about thirty pounds, wore prosthetic teeth and was transformed by make-up. She won Best Actress. Roger Ebert, reviewing it, called it one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema.

There is a real case for this kind of work, and it should be put fairly.

Sometimes the body is the story. In The Machinist the gauntness is the character's guilt and insomnia made visible, and no make-up would have looked the same in close-up. In Raging Bull, De Niro's weight is a fighter's decline told in flesh. A body changed for a role can carry meaning that no line of dialogue can, and audiences read it instantly.

The case against starts with medicine. Losing or gaining a large share of your body weight in a few months is hard on the heart, the metabolism and the mind, and the faster it is done, the harder. Doctors who advise productions say so plainly, and actors who have done it more than once describe the after-effects in less cheerful terms than the original publicity did. Bale himself has said more than once that he probably cannot keep doing it.

The deeper case against is about incentives.

Awards bodies, and the Academy above all, reward transformation with remarkable consistency. Playing a real person, playing an illness or a disability, changing your weight or your face: these are the features that recur among acting winners year after year. Matthew McConaughey lost a great deal of weight for Dallas Buyers Club, released in 2013, and won Best Actor. The pattern is so familiar that awards campaigns are built around it, with the before-and-after photographs doing much of the work.

This is where critics talk about confusing effort with art. Effort can be measured. It comes in pounds and months and it fits into a headline. The quality of a performance does not. A great piece of understated acting, in which an actor who looks exactly like themselves makes you believe in somebody else, leaves nothing to measure and nothing to photograph. It is harder to campaign for, and so, the argument goes, it is under-rewarded.

There is an extra twist with women. Theron's performance was often discussed as a beautiful woman making herself ugly, as if the courage lay in the make-up chair. The coverage told you more about how the industry sees actresses than about what she did on screen, which was to play a frightening, damaged person from the inside, with sympathy and without pleading.

None of this means transformation performances are bad. Many of them are superb. The critique is narrower and more uncomfortable: the system pays for the part of the work that can be seen, and an actor deciding whether to put their health at risk for a role is also, whether they like it or not, deciding whether to give the voters a number.

The best of these performances would survive without the number. The useful question to ask of any of them is whether they would.