You don’t have to suffer for your Oscar anymore

With the Oscars looming on Sunday, it feels like we’re seeing nominees put themselves under less physical strain (pictured, Charlize Theron’s transformation into Aileen Wuornos for Monster) (Picture: Gene Page/Mdp/New Market/Kobal/Shutterstock)

We’ve finally almost made it to the 2025 Oscars, both the highest-profile event and finish line of awards season, which wraps everything up with a big, highly sought-after, shiny bow.

And it seems this year that the type of performance Academy voter members are happy to bestow the gift of the statuette on could mark a shift in trends – and against a long-held assumption.

The general race for top gongs has been considered more open than usual with plenty of well-regarded movies jockeying for the position of front-runner, a title which has fluctuated between the likes of Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, Conclave and Anora in the past several weeks.

The supporting acting categories seem to be the ones with the most predictable Oscar winners on Sunday night, given Zoe Saldaña and Kieran Culkin’s dominance for their turns in embattled crime musical Emilia Pérez and poignant dramedy A Real Pain, respectively.

Meanwhile, there could be room for a surprise in the leading categories after Mikey Madison’s shock victory over Demi Moore’s comeback performance in The Substance at the Baftas, and an utterly thrilled Timothée Chalamet, who clinched the SAG Award despite Adrien Brody’s previous dominance in their lane for The Brutalist.

But Chalamet presents a curious prospect at the Academy Awards after the 29-year-old star revealed he had put on 20lbs to play folk icon and singer Bob Dylan.

Timothée Chalamet has harked back to old Academy Award campaign days by talking about gaining weight to play Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (Picture: Reuters)

‘I did all the work, like you just described, physicality, behaviour-wise. But something we haven’t really talked about, I also put on 20lbs because, believe it or not, I was thinner than the guy, you know?’ he told NPR’s All Things Considered in January.

Prior to this he had seemingly been going for more of a goofy, free-wheeling awards campaign approach by riding a Lime bike onto the red carpet of A Complete Unknown’s London premiere and attending his own lookalike competition. But this casually imparted information suddenly felt like a throwback to the Oscars drives of 20-odd years ago, when the emphasis was on physical transformation – and even better if it suggested some kind of major sacrifice or suffering on the part of the actor in question.

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This type of preparation for a role has definitely seen performances nominated – and sometimes ultimately winning – in the past. Take Christian Bale putting on 40lbs to play former US Vice President Dick Cheney in Vice, for which he was nominated (after famously losing a drastic 62lbs for 2004’s The Machinist), and Jared Leto, who lost 40lbs to portray a drug addict transgender woman with AIDs – and won.

Many stars, like Christian Bale (pictured as Dick Cheney in Vice), have been nominated for, and/or won gongs, for appearing to suffer for their art (Picture: Matt Kennedy/Annapurna Pictures via AP)

There’s also been Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, for which she put on 30lbs – as well as shaving off her eyebrows – and Anne Hathaway, whose best supporting actress victory was almost certainly helped along in some circles by her losing nearly two stone to portray the tuberculosis ridden and starving Fantine in Les Misérables.

Previous recognition for performances such as this has certainly suggested, if you’ll pardon the pun, an appetite for actors to demonstrate any internal work they do for a role with external work that can be more easily judged; a sort of sign post to help when judging ‘good acting’ is almost entirely subjective anyway.

To note, this piece is not looking at the extreme, more method approaches that actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio enjoy taking for their performances (such as eating raw bison liver and sleeping in animal carcasses for The Revenant), so as to settle into their characters. Instead, it’s considering the physical stress actors have put their bodies through with extreme transformations.

People – Oscars voters and fans alike – have seemed to think real and drastic physical changes show ‘proper’ commitment and dedication to a role, certainly 10, 20 years ago. But is it really necessary now? Especially with the known health risks attached, made worse by the tight time frames in which actors have had to transform their bodies in the past; Bale actually had to immediately put back on all the weight he’d lost for The Machinist and then gain more as he bulked up to play playboy superhero Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins.

Anne Hathaway won a best supporting actress Oscar for her turn in Les Misérables as Fantine, for which she lost weight rapidly – but was reluctant to share her method publicly (Picture: Universal/Everett/Rex/Shutterstock)

Adrien Brody, again a best actor favourite on Sunday, 22 years after the first time he won the accolade and became the youngest man ever to do so at 29, has also revealed the toll his physical transformation took on him in that role.

Playing composer-pianist and Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman left him with an eating disorder and possible PTSD, Brody has said, after he dropped 30lbs and was barely drinking water, all while playing the piano for hours a day.

‘That was a physical transformation that was necessary for storytelling,’ Brody told New York Magazine’s Vulture in December.

‘But then that kind of opened me up, spiritually, to a depth of understanding of emptiness and hunger in a way that I didn’t know, ever.’

A best actor nominee again in 2025, Adrien Brody has spoken about the gruelling side effects shedding weight for his Oscar-winning role in The Pianist had on him – and not mentioned it this time around (Picture: Guy Ferrandis/Focus Features/Studio Canal/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock)

The effects lingered with him after production wrapped, leaving him with insomnia and panic attacks, and the star said he ‘had an eating disorder for at least a year’, as well as feeling depressed. And it’s not the first time the actor has opened up about this, saying before that he can’t watch his award-winning film and sharing: ‘I kind of cry when I talk about it.’

For The Brutalist and his Academy Award campaign this time around though, it isn’t part of his performance or the conversation around it. Instead, the actor has talked about the emotional preparation he did in drawing on his own family history to portray Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth, an immigrant in America after World War II – and also a Holocaust survivor.

This seems the biggest indicator yet of a shift in performance priorities – or at least how it is perceived by others. In recent years, actors are also relying more on prosthetics, given the continuing advances in makeup, hairstyling and practical effects. Brendan Fraser used an advanced, if controversial, prosthetic suit to help his portrayal of Charlie, a reclusive teacher who weighs 600lbs, in The Whale.

2023’s best actor Oscar winner was Brendan Fraser, whose physical transformation for The Whale was down to prosthetics (Picture: A24 via AP)

Fraser, an actor who was also returning to the spotlight after years in the wilderness, duly won the Oscar in 2023. And Moore is sill this year’s bet for leading actress at the Oscars for her role as Elisabeth in The Substance, a fading star drawn to drastic measures to protect her body from ageing.

Of course, in these cases it would also not have been either safe or realistic to explore another route, especially as in Moore’s case it would be anatomically impossible for her to sprout the extra face or appendages required by the end of the movie. But it still feels like a sea change in terms of stepping away from actors feeling forced to go to physical extremes and suffer for their Oscar.

All that being said, it’s still entirely possible that the five years Chalamet dedicated of his life to capturing the essence of Dylan – including the weight gain – could see him anointed this year’s Academy Award-winning best actor (co-incidentally breaking Brody’s record by a matter of months). This would come after an unfashionably (but refreshingly) sincere SAG Awards acceptance speech, where he shared his yearning to be ‘one of the greats’.

Demi Moore – widely seen as the one to beat to best actress at this year’s Academy Awards – also had her performance aided by prosthetics (Picture: Mubi)

‘I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there. So I’m deeply grateful to that. This doesn’t signify that, but it’s a little more ammo, a little more fuel to keep going,’ he vowed onstage.

I would argue it would be because of his honesty and naked ambition though, rather than any literal suffering for his art.

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