Actresses who did serious training for a role

Gal Gadot already had the face to play one of the DC universe’s most notoriously gorgeous girl heroes when she was cast as Wonder Woman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice — but it took some serious work in the gym to turn her long, lean, runway model’s body into an Amazonian temple of muscle for Wonder Woman’s stand-alone flick. 

Gadot, who was unable to do a single pullup at the start of her training, spent nine months bulking up for the role. By the time she was in costume and in front of the cameras, she’d gained seventeen pounds — “And it’s all muscle,” she told Glamour. “I feel so much better now. When you feel strong, it changes everything — your posture, the way you walk. I look at photos from five years ago and think, Whoa, I was too skinny.” And it wasn’t just the physical transformation she had to accomplish; Gadot also had to learn to ride horseback and swing a sword in service of the film’s intense battle scenes.

Until recently, Alison Brie was best known for playing Trudy, the long-suffering wife of Pete Campbell on Mad Men — a role which required serious acting skills but absolutely no stuntwork. So when she landed a starring role in Netflix’s GLOW (that’s Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), she had to train like a madwoman to get in literal fighting shape. 

Sometimes, that meant intense workouts where she and her fellow GLs of W hurled weighted objects onto the gym floor; sometimes, it meant carrying her 220-pound trainer, Jason Walsh, around the room on her back. Walsh said his goal was to turn Brie into someone who could both dish out and take a hit. “Alison would be jumping off ropes and landing on people and flipping. I wanted to get her resilient so she didn’t run the risk of injury,” he said.

Few actresses have ever gotten into the kind of shape that Hilary Swank did for her Academy award-winning role as a champion boxer in Million Dollar Baby, and now that we’ve gotten the scoop on how she did it, we understand why! Swank had to overhaul her entire lifestyle and adopt a tightly regimented routine in which her workouts, her meals, and even her sleep were all planned out down to the minute.

“My training was two and a half hours of boxing and approximately an hour and a half to two hours lifting weights every day, six days a week,” the actress said. “The producers asked me to gain 10 pounds of muscle. I gained 19 pounds of muscle. I started at 110 and went to 129. And in order to do that, I had to eat 210 grams of protein a day. Now, your body can only assimilate so much protein, so I had to eat every hour and a half.” Swank also described drinking ten egg whites per day and sleeping nine hours per night — but with a midnight alarm so that she could get up and choke down a protein shake in the wee hours of the morning.

In order to play Beatrix “The Bride” Kiddo in Quentin Tarantino’s modern-day Kill Bill duet of kung fu films, Uma Thurman had to be able to kill Bill in several dozen different ways — and at least two languages. 

Thurman described the litany of skills she had to train for, in an interview, saying, “Three styles of kung fu, two styles of sword fighting, knife throwing, knife fighting, hand-to-hand combat, Japanese speaking. It was literally absurd.” Needless to say, it took a serious investment of time and effort to take it from absurd to awesome. Said Thurman of her grueling regimen with martial arts master Wu Ping, “They trained me five days a week for three months from nine in the morning until five o’clock at night and we were not to be late and I never got to leave early.”

Angelina Jolie doesn’t just accept physically demanding roles; she seeks them out, and then looks for ways to make them even more hardcore. In a special feature included on the Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life DVD, the movie’s director reveals that Jolie came on board with a list of new skills and new fighting techniques she wanted to learn for the film — requiring her to train in everything from horseback riding to stick fighting, before all was said and done. 

Jolie clearly got a taste for pushing herself to the limit. Seven years later, she completed a grueling training regimen in two new martial arts in order to play the title role in Salt. “For her fight training, we got her learning a combination of Muay Thai and Krav Maga very early on,” the film’s stunt instructor, Simon Crane, explained. “The training, at the early stages, took up about three to four sessions a week, lasting approximately two hours each. When we started filming, we trained during lunch breaks or on the weekends.”

How intense was Natalie Portman’s training regimen for Black Swan? The actress herself probably sums it up best, “There were some nights that I thought I literally was going to die.” To prepare for her role as the star of Darren Aronofsky’s thriller about a mentally unbalanced ballerina, Portman spent a full year developing the basic ballet skills required to execute the film’s choreography — dancing for five hours a day, every day. 

But once production kicked into gear, those five hours of daily dancing turned into sixteen, which, in combination with an ultra-restrictive dancer’s diet, saw Portman shed twenty pounds from her already-thin frame. Fortunately, the actress’ misery had company; her co-star Mila Kunis had to endure a similarly grueling routine.

Emily Browning wasn’t alone when it came to getting her butt kicked in the gym as she and her Sucker Punch co-stars prepared to star in Zack Snyder’s action-packed fantasy in 2011. According to a report from the AAP (via the Sydney Morning Herald), the actresses’ training routine as an all-day affair, beginning with “4.5 hours of martial arts and empty-hand weapons training each morning under the tutelage of stunt co-ordinator Damon Caro, who prepared Gerard Butler and David Wenham for Snyder’s Ancient Greek epic 300 and Matt Damon in the Bourne films.” And after lunch? “[Ex]-Navy Seals tortured the actresses with weight training, body-weight pull ups, pulling tires and other primitive forms of exercise.”

Browning had the farthest to go in order to transform her body and acquire the combat skills to make herself believable as a warrior, and even her co-stars weren’t quite sure she could do it. Jena Malone described her doubts, saying, “I remember the first day I met her I was like ‘Really? This little thing?’ but she has incredible will power and was willing to go the distance.”

The actress can be seen on a behind-the-scenes featurette looking askance at a set of weights, but that same video also shows her lifting it all, and then some. Of her experience, the actress said, “Learning to fight… was the most fun I’ve ever had on a film, I think. Learning to use a sword — it’s a pretty amazing feeling to be able to do that.”

For Rebecca Ferguson, preparing for her star turn in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was an almost-impossible mission unto itself: to get in butt-kicking, gun-slinging, opera-rooftop-rappelling shape in just six weeks before shooting began. 

In an interview with Lifescript, Ferguson’s trainer Sam Eastwood described training the actress six hours a day, six days a week, in the month and a half before the film began principal photography. And considering who her fitspiration was, Ferguson’s goals weren’t exactly easy to attain. “She had to be strong and she had to be able to fight for 10 minutes and go at it again and again and again,” Eastwood said. “Rebecca had to be tough and as strong as Tom Cruise but still have a long, lean, muscle-toned body.”

As for Ferguson, she says that everyone involved in the movie was more or less conspiring to make sure she never missed a workout, from the nutritionist who planned her meals to the chauffeur who picked her up at the airport for her first day on set. “I arrived at Heathrow airport, and the driver took me directly to the gym,” she told Shape. But now that it’s over, says Ferguson, she actually misses the super-strict diet and training regimen she endured to make Mission Impossible a reality. “I’ve actually never felt so pure as I felt during this filming.”

Despite Hollywood’s reputation for embellishment and subterfuge, there’s nothing fake about the effort these actresses put in to prepare for these physically demanding roles. So the next time you’re watching a superhero movie, or an on-screen dance-off, be sure to take a moment to appreciate all the hard work that went into it before the cameras ever started rolling.