I find celebrity weight gain and weight loss stories so interesting because they’re unlike what the rest of us go through. The weight kind of creeps on gradually and seems like it takes forever to lose, and I assume it’s the opposite for underweight people trying to gain, although that’s foreign to me. When celebrities do it quickly it sounds crazy, like when Ryan Gosling and Jared Leto drank melted ice cream to gain weight for specific roles (although Ryan did it without the director’s go-ahead and lost the job). For some reason that weight gain method stuck in my head, probably because it sounded awesome at the time. Well Jamie Bell recently drank a lot of homemade milkshakes to gain weight to play a chubby white supremacist and found it nasty. He described what it was like to Us Weekly:

For Bell, 33, expanding his waistline was all part of embracing this character. “This was a man who didn’t have a healthy lifestyle. This is a man who swilled beer and ate barbecue and got in fights and lifted weights, and was literally, kind of, killing himself from the inside out,” Bell told Us Weekly exclusively at a Los Angeles screening of the film on Thursday, July 11. “So I wanted to replicate that a little bit.”

After reading up on skinheads and white supremacists, Bell wasn’t quite identifying with his character, which is why he decided to get contact lenses and gain roughly 20 pounds. “It took a lot of tooling and retooling,” he explained. If I don’t buy it, you all are not going to buy it … It was important for me that when I looked back at myself in the mirror, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy.’ Not that I don’t recognize myself, but to a degree that it’s like I am three, four, five steps away from what I actually am as a human being.”

According to costar Danielle Macdonald, who plays Bell’s significant other in the film, her fictional partner bulked up with some help from Ben & Jerry. “Jamie was drinking,” the 28-year-old told Us exclusively. “He was actually putting Ben & Jerry’s in a blender and drinking it because he couldn’t stomach eating at anymore. He was trying to eat like two pints of Ben & Jerry’s a day.”

The Dumplin’ star joked that watching the calorie-dense ritual occur made her feel ill, adding: “I felt bad for him. I feel like it’s people’s dream to just eat Ben and Jerry’s everyday and it was sickening.”

[From US Magazine]

I recently gave up ice cream after I developed the Alpha Gal allergy to mammal meat as I heard that high fat dairy can cause problems too. I lost five pounds within a couple of weeks without even trying. (I used to eat ice cream every night.) I’m eating small amounts again, but it just makes me think how many calories it has. Fried food is like that too, I remember Beyonce saying she gave it up to lose weight. If you love fried food it adds up fast! Ben & Jerry’s is the best commercial ice cream, with Haagen Dazs a close second. I think I could do about 3/4 of a pint of Half Baked a night without a problem, and I’ll be honest I have done that, but two in a blender just sounds gross. Milkshakes are tasty but they make you sick to your stomach and disgusted with yourself. Ooh before I got this allergy I tried a Burger King shake on Kaiser’s suggestion. I split a small oreo shake with my son. It was SO GOOD.

Here’s a link to the trailer for Skin. I like Danielle MacDonald but do we need another movie about white supremacists, even one with a change of heart? It feels like Charlottesville was too recent and we’re not out of this yet. He does look bigger and he can act.

Also, Jamie and his wife of two years, Kate Mara, had a baby in May, whom Bell is referring to here as his second kid (his first is with Evan Rachel Wood) but they’ve been so low-key about it I totally forgot.

Maybe Bell was a little beefier here but it’s so hard to tell.
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