Featured Image Credit: BBC / Neil Mockford via Getty Images
Topics: TV and Film
Michael Slavin
Spoilers for season one of SAS Rogue Heroes from paragraph four onwards.
Connor Swindells, one of the stars of SAS Rogue Heroes, has spoken about the drastic diet he had to undertake for the second season of the show.
Swindells stars as David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, and in the recently released season two, he underwent a dramatic weight loss.
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The show follows the formation of the SAS during World War Two before following with their campaigns in Africa in season one and Italy in season two.
SAS Rogue Heroes follows the real-life story of the SAS, though one scene had to be changed because the actual events were too unbelievable.
The first season ends with Stirling being captured, something which genuinely happened in real life as Stirling spent the rest of the war as a POW.
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However, the show’s creator Steven Knight decided that the actor had to return for the second season.
In an exclusive interview with LADbible, Swindells revealed that, in order to play Stirling believably as a prisoner-of-war, he had to diet.
He said: “I think I didn't have any boot camp. I sort of put myself under a self-imposed diet. I wanted to get a bit skinnier and look a bit more gone, which I didn't enjoy.
“Yeah, I'm actually on that diet again. I've just eaten a plate full of egg [whites].”
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Swindells didn’t know the exact amount of weight he'd lost for season two, but described it as a ‘good chunk’.
He went on to say of the dieting: “It was a personal decision. It was described in the script a lot that he goes through a big weight change, so it was laid out for me.
“I wanted to just feel, you know, a sense of hunger for getting out of that place where he was at and it helped. I don't know if I'd really done it before. It required me, you know, not drinking and doing all of that stuff is, you know, just restricting everything you're doing really.
“I was running a lot of the time because I was training for a half marathon that I did. But, yeah, it wasn't fun.
He went on to clarify, however: “But again, I want to reiterate, it was nothing in comparison to what people like this really go through
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“It was purely for my own vanity.”
It clearly paid off, as SAS: Rogue Heroes has received a second successive season of 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and across the board rave reviews.
In their perfect five star review, Jack Seale of The Guardian said: “With its sober view of sacrifice and its clever use of extreme adversity to bring out different facets of the male psyche, Rogue Heroes earns its stripes, but be reassured that with all that groundwork in place it is, primarily, a right old romp.”
In their similarly positive four star review, Martin Robinson of the London Evening Standard said: “It isn’t messing with the formula, this one is even bigger and louder, and gets on with delivering the same kicks as the first but with some additional audience pleasing tricks.”
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SAS Rogue Heroes series one and two are available now on BBC iPlayer