Dan Stevens ate four roast dinners a day to bulk up for his role as the Beast in ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
The 34-year-old actor – who stars alongside Emma Watson as Belle in the live adaption of the Disney animated classic – has revealed he would indulge on piles of meat, roast potatoes and vegetables to get to the required size to portray his monster character.
In an interview with the new issue of Radio Times magazine, he revealed: "I was honestly eating four roast dinners every day, just to keep any form of physicality."
And the British hunk also had to endure wearing metal stilts for half of the day on set and he also had to wear a "muscle vest" to make him look hefty.
It was sweltering work for Dan, who also had to wear a cooling pack underneath so he didn’t "waste away".
He explained: "It was a pretty athletic job for me. I was physically conditioning my legs to be on stilts for 12 hours a day and also conditioning the rest of me so that I didn’t waste away – I was losing so much fluid through sweating. Underneath the muscle vest, I wore a special cooling vest, similar to what Formula One drivers wear, with refrigerator-style tubing.
"I would overheat, especially when we were dancing, so between takes there was a little tube that could be plugged in to ice-cold water to cool me down."
Meanwhile, Dan recently said he thinks ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – which is based on French author Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1740 fairy tale ‘La Belle et la Bete’ – touches on a "classic Disney theme".
He has praised director Bill Condon for making it alluring, in part, because of its exploration of the issue of absent parents.
He explained: "It’s a classic Disney theme, absent parents. Dead mothers and fathers all over the place!
"That really occupies a lot of fairy tales. The absent parent, and what is that filled with? If you have that missing element in the equation, what fills that? What influences it? For good or ill."
Dan Stevens ate four roast dinners daily to bulk up for Beauty and the Beast
