Ben Foster Talks Losing 62 Pounds for Holocaust Role
The New York-based actor, working with the Shoah Foundation, also spent hundreds of hours listening to testimonies of concentration camp survivors.
Significance of playing Harry Haft?
Roles like this don’t come along very often. The human experience is messy. Working with the Shoah Foundation, I listened to hundreds of hours of testimonies and was lent the opportunity to sit and saturate in the voices of the survivors.
Losing great weight for the part?
I didn’t have to, but I felt that it would have been an injustice to let them digitally shrink me down. You’ve seen the pictures of people in the camps. My target was so I could see the bones in my chest.
How much did that take?
Ultimately, I lost 62 pounds. It took five months. And then we had to take five weeks off [from shooting] so that I could get back to light heavyweight for the ring, which meant putting on 50 pounds. It was pasta time. And that was great.
Learning how to box?
My grandfather was a boxer, and my father boxes to this day. So the sweet science is something that’s part of our family. And I enjoyed watching boxing.
You are Jewish. family members in the camps?
No. My nana had escaped Romania when she was 8. My grandfather’s parents emigrated from Ukraine, and he was born in the United States.
Going from starring as Harry Haft to slave owner in Emancipation?
It was so shocking arriving on the Emancipation set and seeing the similarities between Nazi Germany and the enslavement of human beings in our own country. And I think what [director] Antoine [Fuqua] and Mr. Smith have done is something that will shake people to their core. Emancipation is a film that needs to be seen. Most films aren’t needed. They’re entertainment.
Have you talked to Will Smith?
We are in communication, and I’ll just say that I’m staying out of that business.
What’s next?
I’ve been prepping in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for a beautiful script by Brian Helgeland called Finestkind that’s about multigenerational scallopers. Brian himself was a fisherman, and his father was a fisherman. It’s with Tommy Lee Jones and Toby Wallace. In fact, I just got back from an extraordinary trip where I embedded with a deep-sea fisherman on a six-day scalloping trip on a commercial fishing boat. We had 15- to 20-foot swells on the boat on our trip. It’s quite a world.
Living in New York versus L.A.?
I’m a walker. People in L.A. looked at me funny, and cops would slow down as if to say, “What’s this person doing? Why were they walking on this sidewalk?” I got tired of being looked at that way. I have love for Los Angeles, but I really don’t want to spend too much time thinking about the industry aspect of it. It’s nice to walk into a cafe and not see everybody on Final Draft. I have Final Draft on my computer, too, but I like to think about other things sometimes.
