Hollywood vanity notwithstanding, there's a long tradition of actors seeking credibility by drastically altering their appearance for a role. Matthew McConaughey is only the latest to follow this approach, having dropped 40 pounds for his much-talked-about turn as a man stricken with AIDS in Dallas Buyer's Club. Yet simply gaining or losing pounds is hardly a surefire way to craft a convincing performance. Given that such transformations often are so severe that they prove to be glaring distractions, stars tread a fine line between enhancing and ruining their lead turns when they radically screw with their looks. With that in mind, we've assigned some grades to ten of the movies' more memorable body transformations, based not so much on how striking they are but on how well they actually work.

Jared Leto

Chapter 27

IMPRESSIVENESS (1-10): 1

Jared Leto did his best Robert De Niro impersonation for his Chapter 27 starring role as Mark David Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon, packing on a whopping 67 pounds via tons of ice cream. That drastic size increase caused Leto to get gout, though it was mostly for naught — the actor's weight gain was merely part and parcel of a performance defined by mannered affectation. Unlike Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary, Leto's girth seemed less a natural extension of the role than a means of attracting award attention.

Jonah Hill

21 Jump Street

IMPRESSIVENESS: 2

Jonah Hill's persona is inextricably linked with his rotund size, so when he dropped weight for 21 Jump Street, the effect was not only jarring but also more than a little off-putting. Though his newly svelte frame was clearly meant to make him more convincing as an undercover cop, Hill looked downright gaunt — which in turn made his sarcastic wisecracking come off as more callous than it seemed when he was roly-polyer.

Matt Damon

Courage Under Fire

IMPRESSIVENESS: 3

Running 6.5 miles each morning and evening while barely eating (and drinking lots of coffee and smoking cigarettes) helped Matt Damon lose 41 pounds to play a medic wrecked by guilt (and drugs) in Courage Under Fire — looking so sickly that director Ed Zwick was reportedly scared by the sight of the actor when he first showed up for work. Alas, while the role helped launch his career, his physical emaciation is so stark that it overwhelms his performance, commanding all of one's attention whenever he's on screen.

Edward Norton

American History X

IMPRESSIVENESS: 5

Like Brad Pitt in Troy, Edward Norton got himself diesel for American History X. His early murder scene, committed in nothing but boxer shorts, is memorable both for the method of his homicide (an unforgettable curb-stomp) and for the sight of Norton's burly frame tattooed with swastikas. His newfound size isn't quite enough to fully convince one of his intimidating badassery, but it's nonetheless in keeping with the character.

Rooney Mara

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

IMPRESSIVENESS: 5

Rooney Mara's turn as goth-punk hacker Lisbeth Salander is moderately undercut by her physical size — she's slight to the point of seeming fragile, which conflicts with Lisbeth's supposed ferocity. Nonetheless, her body transformation does as much as possible to convince one of both her rage and reclusiveness, with shaved eyebrows, multiple piercings, and a closely cropped jet-black hairdo going a long way toward selling the outlandish character.

Demi Moore

G.I. Jane

IMPRESSIVENESS: 6

A year after famously flashing her fake boobs in Striptease, Demi Moore went the opposite direction for this Ridley Scott-helmed military drama. Bald and buff, Moore's physical hardness comes across as an obvious and borderline-contrived attempt to distance herself from her previous film's notoriety (and the image it helped give her). Still, it remains a dedicated body makeover that's completely in tune with the actress's own deceptive toughness.

Tom Hanks

Cast Away

IMPRESSIVENESS: 7

Tom Hanks did double-duty body transformation for Cast Away, gaining 50 pounds for the bookending sections of the film, and then dropping that and more — over the course of a year — for the stranded-on-an-island bulk of Robert Zemeckis's drama. Drastic without seeming over-the-top (and, according to Hanks, responsible for him getting diabetes), it's a shift in line with the character's ordeal that never goes so far into extreme territory that it takes attention away from Hanks's expression of the character's suffering and strength.

Charlize Theron

Monster

IMPRESSIVENESS: 7

An Oscar win validated Charlize Theron's uglification for her role as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. Yet if it proved that nothing pleases awards voters more than beautiful women making themselves unattractive, it's also a physical alteration that — in her grimy hair and gnarly teeth — powerfully evokes the deeply rooted repulsiveness (and messiness) of the character and her circumstances.

Robert De Niro

Raging Bull

IMPRESSIVENESS: 9

For years the standard-bearer of cinematic makeovers, De Niro's corpulence as late-in-life Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull remains a magnificent physical manifestation of the character's self-destruction. All sweaty, ungainly, gone-to-seed sloppiness, De Niro's weight gain is presented with minimum glamour — there isn't a trace of look-at-me narcissism to his performance, which uses girth to fully express the man's pathetic, marginalized fate.

Christian Bale

The Machinist

IMPRESSIVENESS: 10

There's weight loss, extreme weight loss, and then the starving-oneself-to-near-death weight loss practiced by Christian Bale for The Machinist. An insanely dangerous stunt? Definitely. And yet Bale's skeletal appearance proves that, when pushed to its absolute furthest extreme, such body transformations can be both distracting gimmicks and jaw-droppingly compelling feats of artistic devotion to performance. For now, it's attention-grabbing emaciation without rival.

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Nick Schager Nick Schager is a NYC-area film critic and culture writer with twenty years of professional experience writing about all the movies you love, and countless others that you don’t.

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