Shailene Woodley ate 350 calories a day towards the end of filming Adrift
None of us have seen Adrift yet, it’s the kind of movie I’d rather watch at home as it seems hard to take in a theater, but it’s done somewhat well with critics. The film hasn’t recouped its production budget yet, so many people must agree with me. During promotion, Shailene Woodley has been talking about her newfound feminism and about the fact that she and costar Sam Claflin were on a very restrictive diet in the last weeks of filming. It’s not a spoiler to say that their characters were stranded on a boat in the ocean with limited access to food. (This was based on a memoir and true story, although Adrift took a lot of artistic license.) Shailene previously said that a sexy peanut butter scene was so true-to-life because she and Sam were basically starving. In an interview with The Times [via People], Shailene revealed that her diet for the last two weeks of filming was just 350 calories a day and that she was miserable.
[Shailene], 26, opened up about her rigorous diet for the film in which she plays Tami Oldham, who found herself adrift on a stricken boat alongside her injured fiancé.
“For the last two weeks I had a can of salmon, some steamed broccoli and two egg yolks every day — 350 calories,” Woodley told The Times of her strict diet for the film. “It was f—— miserable.”
“I can’t sleep when I’m hungry so I would have a glass of wine to basically pass the f— out,” she said.
[From The Times via People]
I’m fascinated by actor diet stories, because it amazes me that anyone could eat that little for more than a day. It’s supremely unhealthy, but more than that whenever I eat less than around 1,200 calories I get ravenously hungry and pig out the next day. I have friends who have gone on very low calorie diets and have lost weight quickly but then they just went back to how they were eating before and gained it back. In this case the actor is doing it for a role and it probably helps them embody the character. I just wonder if that’s taking method acting too far.
Shailene is wearing Altuzarra below, at the London premiere of Adrift. This is sharp, but her AOL build suit is a little frumpy.