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ShareYou gained 30 pounds (14 kg approximately) for the role in The Informant!. What was the motivation for transforming yourself like that?
Once Steven Soderbergh (the director) made the decision to take it in a more comic direction tonally, for all of us it became less important to do the kind of rigorous character studies of the actual people.
From there on, it was more about having fun with this terrific script. We had it for seven years. Scott (Z Burns, the screenplay writer) wrote it seven years ago and we were sitting with it. We would refer back to it once or twice a year and we'd always say, 'Yeah, I read it again last night. It's still really good.' And so, in that sense, we'd examined it enough that all the answers we needed were in the actual text, like when you do a play.
Why the wait before you could make the movie?
I sent Steven an email about two months before we were finally getting ready to do it, and I said, 'What do you want this guy to look like physically?' And he just wrote back, 'Doughy.' So that was it. Those were my marching orders. I didn't question it; I just started eating.
How did that extra weight make you feel?Did it change you on a day-to-day basis?Did you feel differently about yourself?
It felt fantastic, actually. Gaining weight was easy. I just ate whatever I wanted to. Compared to a Jason Bourne movie where it's like I go home after a day of work and I've got to go to the gym, I just preferred to eat.
