A couple weeks ago I was casually thumbing through the Nov. 19 issue of Entertainment Weekly when I noticed that several actor profiles all had a little subhead by their articles that said “Star in Training.” I was curious what that was all about.
Turns out the subhead was referring the to nearly Olympic levels of physical discipline that Mark Wahlberg, Gwyneth Paltrow and Natalie Portman had committed to in order to play a part.
Wahlberg said of learning to box for his film The Fighter,
"I wanted to look like a world-class boxer, not just like some actor who can box pretty good. … We'd train eight, 10 hours a day. [Boxer] Micky [Ward, on whom the film is based] and Dicky [Eklund, Ward's half-brother] lived at my house, and we would start the day at six in the morning, running eight miles to church and back. We'd have breakfast and then start training."
The story was pretty much the same for Gwyneth Paltrow, a guitar-playing novice who was determined to actually strum and sing for her role in Country Strong. “[Faking it] is just not my style,” she said. “I was going into such another world, and I wanted it to be as authentic as possible.”
She had to overcome a huge training hurdle because, as she admitted to EW, “I had never played guitar ever, ever.” But with help from British session guitarist Mark Jaimes—and a lot of painful practice—she learned to play.
"I played all the time, and my hands were bleeding and cramping. I sucked. I cried, like five times over four months. … It's much harder than it looks. But at the same time, it was kind of exhilarating to be learning chords and putting them together."
Finally, we have Natalie Portman’s commitment to, essentially, becoming a prima ballerina for her role in Darren Aronofsky’s dark psychological drama Black Swan. Not only did she lose 20 pounds to squeeze into her tutu, she trained hours daily for months to pull off the role. Her trainer, Mary Helen Bowers, told EW, “She really lived the life of a dancer for the months leading up to the film.” Portman herself said of her deprivation and discipline, “I was the little good girl: no drinking, waking up at five to do my workouts, and not eating.” In a separate interview with Us Magazine, she added, “I think it was just the physicality of it all that was the most extreme. I mean, I had never gotten that much training—to be doing five-to-eight hours a day of [it] was really a challenge.”
After I got done reading these articles, a couple of parallel thoughts raced through my brain.
The first was this: These actors’ extreme commitment to their craft—arguably to the point of putting their health in danger in the case of Portman’s weight plunging to a wispy 95 pounds—puts my own commitment to much more important things to shame. For a time, they’re willing to sacrifice everything in their lives to tell a single story … but I’m often unwilling to make much smaller sacrifices for the sake of my family, my faith and my job.
Second, I thought about how often and how easy it is to adopt a semi-permanent posture of lament and negativity when it comes to how much influence Hollywood has. Now, it’s true that much of what we see in the entertainment industry deserves to be lamented. But listening to these tales of rigorous training; of blood, sweat, and tears; of weight loss; I realized that the influence actors like Walhberg, Paltrow and Portman exert is directly related to their willingness to sacrifice for what they believe in. Their influence—for good or ill—is proportional to their commitment.
Again, I was forced to think about my life. I’ll never have the broad, culture-wide influence of an A-list Hollywood actor (nor do I aspire to it). But I do have opportunities to influence people all around me every day by the choices I make, by my own discipline and commitment. To the extent that I’m willing to submit my life and my values to Jesus, I’ll have an opportunity to exert influence on behalf of His kingdom. Conversely, to the extent that I’m undisciplined, it likely undermines and blunts the impact that I could have made.
The Apostle Paul put it this way in a passage that, curiously enough, sounds kinda like what these actors say:
"Do you not know that in a race all runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such as way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize." (1 Cor. 9:24-27).
His goal, stated in the verses immediately prior to these, is “to become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I might share in its blessings.”
In Paul’s parlance, Mark, Gwyneth and Natalie are training for a crown that won’t last—in this case, big-screen verisimilitude and the crown of critical cinematic acclaim. But how much more do we who follow Christ have to live for? As much as Paul’s language here makes me squirm a bit—I like my cookies and milk, after all—he’s exhorting us to remember that if anyone should be willing to submit themselves to a rigorous lifestyle for the sake of a bigger goal, it’s those who follow Jesus.
And that’s something to keep in mind the next time an actor on the big screen makes something like boxing, guitar-playing or ballet look effortless. Because odds are, they’ve sacrificed a great deal to generate that illusion.
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