Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass in The Revenant
Just stopping short of actually fighting a bear, DiCaprio went to crazy lengths to play the role of a man who has to go to extreme lengths to survive. Shooting in massively sub-zero temperatures, DiCaprio experienced freezing river dives, wore sodden and then frozen bear skin, and ate raw liver.
Unsurprisingly he got sick (though it did finally bag him that Oscar). “I’m not complaining about the difficulty of it, but it took us all somewhere that we never imagined.”
Marilyn Burns as Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Texas Chainsaw is one of the most traumatic movies to watch, so it shouldn’t be a massive surprise that it was also stressful to work on. Made on a small budget, gritty and scrappy, it saw “Final Girl” Marilyn Burns suffering most at the hands of Leatherface and director Tobe Hooper.
The dinner sequence was particularly traumatic: the set stinking of rotten food under the heat (and co-star Gunnar Hansen stinking in his costume), Sally is hit repeatedly in the head with a sledgehammer (covered with foam rubber but still heavy), then her finger is cut open (for real). Not to mention the exhaustion of being tied up and screaming for hours on end. “It was surrealistic and became so frightening because I had to be tied up and screaming for so long,” she told Terror Trap. “Afterwards, I was just so grateful it was over. I probably was the happiest girl alive.”
Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance in The Shining
The physical and mental torture endured by Duvall is well documented – it made for an amazingly brittle, fractured performance but was not a bundle of laughs at the time.
They shot for 13 months, the infamous baseball bat scene ran to 127 takes, and Duvall said that at times she spent 12 hours a day just screaming. Duvall concedes Kubrick got a great performance out of her, but she describes the experience as “almost unbearable”.