- Josh Hartnett gained 30 pounds for his role in “Oppenheimer.”
- Her co-star Matt Damon warned her that it would be difficult to lose weight after filming wrapped.
- “He was like, ‘You’ll never do that again, man,'” Harnett recalled Damon telling him.
Matt Damon knows a thing or two about the challenges of gaining and losing weight for a role. Unfortunately, he didn’t warn his co-star Josh Harnett before he decided to gain 30 pounds to play famed physicist Ernest Lawrence in “Oppenheimer.”
“He was like, ‘You’ll never do that again, man,'” Harnett recalled Damon saying on “The Tonight Show.”
“He said, ‘You’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to lose that weight, and it’s never going to come off because your body wants to put it back on. You’re going to keep growing back to that size.'”
The fact that Damon’s advice was too little and too late wasn’t lost on Hartnett. “He kept telling me, like, throughout production,” he added. “I was like, ‘Thank you, Matt.'”
Damon knows about the dangers of gaining and losing weight for roles from his own experience. After losing 40 pounds to play a soldier suffering from PTSD in 1996’s “Courage Under Fire,” a doctor told him the dramatic change could permanently shrink his heart.
Years later, he gained 30 pounds for the 2009 satire film “The Informant!” He also trained intensely for the Jason Bourne films, following a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet and cutting out water to show off his body in 2016’s “Jason Bourne.”
But if the actor, now 53, follows his own advice — Hartnett recalls him saying, “Don’t gain weight over 40” — then perhaps Damon’s days of on-set transformations are over.
