12 Times Method Acting Nearly Destroyed Actors' Lives

Christian Bale, who made his feature debut in 1987's Mio in the Land of Faraway, has always been known as an actor unafraid to take his craft to the extreme. But in 2004's The Machinist, he went way beyond the pale - and almost beyond mortality, itself. 

According to sources, Bale dined on just a can of tuna and an apple each day for weeks leading up to the beginning of production. As Bale's co-star Michael Ironside remembers it:

I came to work one day... and I heard 'pssst...Michael!' from behind one of the cabanas. And I went over, and it was Chris. And he said, 'Can you look at this?' And he turned and dropped his overalls, which he was naked under... and the muscles in his ass had literally dropped out of the sockets of his hips... I said, 'You've gone beyond body fat, and now you're into actual muscle tissue and things are being affected.

Nevertheless, Bale persevered, and garnered widespread critical acclaim for his performance.

Since his beginnings as a Disney kid, Shia LaBeouf has evolved into something of a spectacularly dedicated Method actor. He may have had real, onscreen sex for Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac, but that pales in comparison to what he did for 2014's Fury. 

As LaBeouf told Dazed Digital, "I pulled my tooth out, knifed my face up and spent days watching horses die. I didn’t bathe for four months."

Actor Malcolm McDowell was almost as much of a perfectionist as director Stanley Kubrick. When it came to doing multiple takes of potentially physically damaging scenes, though, said dedication sometimes backfired.

During the famous "forced viewing" sequence in A Clockwork Orange, real eye doctors were used. But McDowell still suffered harrowing damage in the form of a scratched cornea and, worse yet, temporary blindness - all as a result of having his "eyes propped open for too long." 

In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini shook the cinematic world with Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which featured a banquet of sh*t. However, said feast was just chocolate. And that's why the scene doesn't have anything on what Divine did in 1972's Pink Flamingos: literally eat dog poop... fresh from the canine's bowels... right off the street.

As Divine, the stage name of Harris Glenn Milstead, once revealed, "I followed that dog around for three hours just zooming in on its assh*le." After the act, however, Milstead became paranoid, and apparently called a Baltimore emergency room to ask about the potentially "harmful effects" of ingesting dog waste. A shocking stroke of method acting, but not one likely to ever be repeated. 

Relegating Klaus Kinski to the ranks of "mere" Method acting seems almost quaint. Kinski - whose onscreen insanity is legendary - drove himself to extremes for veritably every part he played. He was so crazed in his Fitzcarraldo role that a couple of the Peruvian natives (and extras) on the set allegedly offered to kill him for director Werner Herzog. According to Herzog, he declined, but only because he needed Kinski in order to finish the movie. 

And during the filming of Crawlspace, he got so far into his role as a deranged former Nazi he started multiple fights on set, and almost got fired outright.

The extent to which Heath Ledger's final role in The Dark Knight might have contributed to his untimely end remains controversial. As the actor told The New York Times, "Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going."

Rumors linking the performance to Ledger's demise in January 2008 abound, but Ledger was filming a completely different project at the time: The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus. His sister, Kate Ledger, refutes the idea that her brother's The Dark Knight performance led to his passing. "I was really shocked, because that was him having fun," she said of the rumors. "Every report was coming out that he was depressed and that [the role] was taking this toll on him, and we're going, honestly, it was the absolute opposite. It couldn't be more wrong."