Chris Hemsworth has described having to ditch his gym-honed body to go scrawny for his role in In the Heart of the Sea as "brutal".
The Australian actor plays a starving sailor in the new Ron Howard-directed adventure epic, which tells the true story of the Essex, a ship which was attacked by a whale and became the inspiration for Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick.
In order to get in character, Hemsworth had to curb the calories in order to lose weight and he told RTÉ presenter Geri Maye: "It was brutal, it led to a pretty moody existence and I can't say I want to do it again, I've ticked that box and that's it.
"By the end of it it was down to five or six hundred calories, when we started it we had a regular 3,000 and we dwindled it down each week. I was cranky, moody, sensitive to all sorts of trivial things."
The actor also opened up about a moment which really moved him during the shooting, in which he first came to terms with the cruelty of whaling.
He said: "It's a term called `chimneys of fire' when the whale is dying and spurts out blood and it's quite horrific. There's a shot where I'm standing there and I get sprayed with the blood. It struck me in that moment the brutality of it all, not that I hadn't thought about it prior but for whatever reason it started to hit me more doing that scene.
"We did want to have a sense of that moral dilemma with the men, they did understand, they wrote about this in their journals, yes it was the way of life and that was their job, but it was horrific and at what cost to nature and so on. That was something that did stick with me."
Chris Hemsworth opens up about his gruelling diet for #InTheHeartOfTheSea No wonder he doesn't want to do it again! https://t.co/5q0wT643HC
— RTÉ TEN (@RTE_TEN) December 18, 2015
In the Heart of the Sea opens in cinemas on December 26.
