Unlike many stars who try to make risky dieting sound easy, giving audiences unrealistic expectations for their own bodies, Holland cuts straight to the chase. “It was awful. Truly,” he told GQ of the experience that saw him lose a significant amount of his body weight. The actor says his trainer, George Ashwell, restricted his diet to 500 calories per day and told him to run 10 miles. After surviving the shoot on these unsustainable numbers, Holland then had to regain the weight with similar quickness.

“I got very sick, actually,” he says about the process. “And it’s changed my relationship with food completely. I think I would find it very difficult to find a role that would warrant that sort of abuse on my body again.” As miserable as it is that the actor went through this, it’s great to hear him call it what it is: abuse to one’s body. By any professional measurement, that diet would be diagnosable as an eating disorder. Yet for some reason, it’s been seen as an industry standard for actors for years.

This type of dangerous change has never gone without consequences, but it seems like actors are only recently beginning to open up about saying no to unhealthy dieting. Way back in 2000, Jared Leto said he felt like he was “addicted to losing weight” after “Requiem For A Dream.” In 2017, Tom Hardy admitted that his crash dieting for roles like that of Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises” permanently changed his body, telling The Daily Beast, “I think you pay the price with any drastic physical changes.” And Kumail Nanjiani memorably spoke about his complex relationship with his masculinity and self-image after undergoing some serious changes ahead of his role in “Eternals.” Nanjiani told GQ in 2021, “It’s about defeating. And that’s what the male ideal has been.”