George Clooney may have gotten a little too into character for his latest film role. In The Midnight Sky he plays Augustine, a gout astronomer with cancer who, as the sole survivor of an apocalyptic event, braces for the Earthbound return of astronauts who have no clue their planet is inhabitable.
According to the UK’s Mirror, the Oscar-winning actor lost almost 14kg to achieve Augustine’s emaciated state, which hospitalised him with pancreatitis four days before filming began.
According to Mayo Clinic, pancreatitis is caused by inflammation of the pancreas. Symptoms include abdominal pain, fever, nausea, and vomiting. It occurs “when digestive enzymes become activated while still in the pancreas, irritating the cells of your pancreas and causing inflammation,” per the clinic.
“I think I was trying too hard to lose the weight quickly and probably wasn’t taking care of myself,” Clooney told Mirror. The 59-year-old also directed the film, and his diagnosis took a toll on early production.
“It took a few weeks to get better and as a director it’s not so easy because you need energy,” he explained. On the upside, the condition played right into Augustine. “We were out on this glacier in Finland, which made it a lot harder work. But it certainly helped with the character,” Clooney said. “This is bigger than anything I’ve done before and it was like herding cats to get it done. But, you know, it was fun.”
As Augustine, Clooney is nearly unrecognizable. He’s obviously thinner and sports a shaved head and gray, scraggly beard. He told Mirror that his wife Amal and 3-year-old daughter, Ella were not the biggest fans of the facial hair.
“[They] were really happy when it came off because it was very hard to find a face underneath all that mess,” he said. But Ella’s twin brother Alexander loved it “because he’d hide things in it, which I wouldn’t know about until I got to work and I’d be like, ‘Oh, there’s a popsicle stuck in my beard,’” he quipped.
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