Matt Damon was all the buzz at last week’s Toronto Film Festival. His new movie, The Informant, was highly regarded, but more people were talking about his considerable weight gain for the role. At the festival an OK Magazine blogger caught up with Damon to get the inside scoop on how he gained the weight. He explained that he planned his weight gain approximately four months before filming. First, he quit exercising for two months and then after that he noticed the weight gain in the third and fourth months. He even admitted to enjoying being chubby and his wife said that he had ‘more to love.’ Damon explained,

“I really did love it. If I had to stay there, I’d be happy. I had to stop exercising two months before I started to put it on, and did the movie a couple months later.”

The biggest mystery is to how Damon gained the weight and then dropped it so quickly. However, it’s normally easy for guys to lose weight faster than women. According to Damon,

“I think people have a natural range of weight that they’re in, and I probably went outside mine so it was probably easier to lose the weight. The gaining weight was alarmingly easy – that was just drinking beer and eating pizza.”

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Matt Damon stars in the film, Steven Soderbergh’s Informant, that is being viewed this week at the Venice film festival. The film is based on the non-fiction book by Kurt Eichenwald which tracks the story of the corporate whistler-blower, Mark Whitacre. To play the part of Whitacre, Damon had to gain a whopping 35 pounds for the role. He said,

“It was very, very easy to gain the weight,” he said. “It was very, very fun, probably the funnest time I had working, because I didn’t have to go to the gym after work and I just ate everything I could see.”

Damon joins the list of many actors and actresses that go to extreme measures in perfecting their method-acting skills. But as we’ve learned from stars like Jamie Foxx who had to undergo counseling and Renee Zellweger whose nutritionist warned her of the health risks, extreme weight gain and weight loss can be detrimental to the body and mind. Of course it will be easy for Damon to lose the weight with the help of his personal trainer and watching what he eats. But even though he gets a fat paycheck for playing the role and can afford the assistance required to lose the weight, it’s a shame that he has to abuse his body for the sake of a movie.

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