Charlize Theron had to pile on the pounds for her upcoming film Tully, which is about a mum-of-three making friends with her babysitter.
The 42-year-old actor says she ate a high-fat diet and literally stuffed her face every day to give off the appearance of a mum who's let herself go. After that huge journey, she managed to put on 50 pounds (22kg/3.5 stone).
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But Charlize has revealed that that deliberate race to put on weight was intense.
She told Entertainment Tonight: "I would literally wake up at two in the morning and I'd have a cup of cold macaroni and cheese just next to me. I would wake up and I would just eat it...I would just, like, shove it in my throat.
"I just I wanted to feel what this woman felt, and I think that was a way for me to get closer to her and get into that mindset. You know, it was a huge surprise to me.
"I got hit in the face pretty hard with depression. Yeah, for the first time in my life I was eating so much processed foods and I drank way too much sugar. I was not that fun to be around on this film."
Theron is known by many for her Hollywood blockbusters roles in The Italian Job, Mad Max: Fury Road and Snow White and the Huntsman, but she received critical acclaim for her starring role in Monster.
Her appearance was radically overhauled by a combination of incredible acting, overeating and prosthetics so that she could adequately portrayal real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos.
But unsurprisingly, delving into the psyche of a person who murdered seven men while working as a prostitute is a tough thing.
Speaking to The Advocate, Charlize said: "Every day was a challenge. Usually, you pick three moments in a script, and you wait for those three days to come and really stretch your acting muscles. But in this case, every scene was that scene.
"What happened was, the more I dived into her life, the more I realized that everything she did physically came from an emotional place.
"This is a woman who sleeps under an underpass. This is a woman who gets into a stranger's car and drives out of state with them."
Unfortunately, it's not as if she could relax once the cameras stopped rolling as the actor said director Patty Jenkins treated Charlize like she was Aileen all the time.
When shooting eventually finished, she said she's never been that tired - but she had to jump on a plane and rehearse for a new film so Theron didn't have much time to process everything.
Goes to show you how much emotion and physical effort actors go through for these roles.
Featured Image Credit: Focus FeaturesTopics: Entertainment, TV and Film, Mental Health, Weight, Interesting