In the words of a crew member on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, the harrowing film shoot for the survivalist epic was “a living hell.” The cast and crew suffered blistering temperatures; the budget ballooned after a global search for snow; crew members fled the project; and some actors were submerged in freezing water while one was reportedly dragged naked across the icy terrain in a 200-person battle scene. And now, The Revenant star Leonardo DiCaprio has opened up about the individual sacrifices he made for the performance that could finally win him that elusive best-actor Oscar.

DiCaprio plays a 19th-century frontiersman who, after suffering a violent bear attack, embarks on a journey through freezing wilderness to exact revenge on the trapper who abandoned him for dead, played by Tom Hardy. And in a new interview, DiCaprio makes it clear that making the movie was, in some ways, just as agonizing as what his character endures in the story.

“I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do,” the actor tells Yahoo. “Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly.”

As for what he ingested in the wild, let's leave it at this: “I certainly don’t eat raw bison liver on a regular basis,” DiCaprio teases. “When you see the movie, you’ll see my reaction to it, because Alejandro kept it in. It says it all. It was an instinctive reaction.”

DiCaprio also discusses filming the graphic bear-attack scene, which involved cables and precise choreography.

“[Those scenes]—amongst many other sequences—were some of the more difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my entire career,” DiCaprio says. “But the end result is going to be one of the most immersive experiences audiences will ever have with what it would be like to come face-to-face with an animal of that magnitude that is incredibly primal.”

Despite his many sacrifices for the role, DiCaprio says he doesn’t regret his decision to take on the project.

“The truth is that I knew what I was getting into,” the actor continues. “This was a film that had been floating around for quite some time, but nobody was crazy enough to really take this on, simply because of the logistics of where we needed to shoot and the amount of work and rehearsal that would have to be done to achieve Alejandro and [cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki] vision.”

According to early awards-season forecasts, DiCaprio could be up against actors like Michael Caine (Youth), Matt Damon (The Martian), Will Smith (Concussion), Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl), Johnny Depp (Black Mass), and Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs) for the best-actor Oscar. But if voters are looking to see which actor suffered the most for his art, as they’ve done in the past, something tells us that eating uncooked bison liver and sleeping in animal carcasses in freezing temperatures trumps wearing an unflattering black turtleneck.

Take a look at DiCaprio’s performance in a trailer for The Revenant below.