He lost 30 pounds in total to portray the role of a boxer
A movie about boxing? You must have thought we’d hit our limit. Southpaw, Jake Gyllenhaal’s 2015 film about a boxer, required him to work up his muscles. For five months, the actor worked out twice a day, seven days a week. To portray Billy Hope, he had to shed 30 pounds.
Those are some serious sit-ups. To be precise, each day there were 2,000 of them. Director Antoine Fuqua described the actor’s makeover as “essentially turning him into a beast.”