Brendan Fraser earned an Oscar nomination for his worthy art-house stunting in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. Fortunately for his heart, he did not go method and gain 450 pounds to portray his character, but SNL host Woody Harrelson’s The Hippo counterpart didn’t fare so well. The five-timer host donned a fat suit to play an actor who kind-of pulled a Ryan Gosling, but even worse. Remember when Gosling gained 60 pounds for The Lovely Bones, only to get sacked by Peter Jackson after showing up on set?
As it turns out, some sort of miscommunication happened there, and Gosling was out of luck and in need of many gym visits after literally drinking melted ice cream for his cause. In the case of Harrelson’s SNL sketch character, all of that extra weight went to waste when the whole The Hippo movie went down the tubes. This turned into a case of “triabetes,” and of course, Chloe Fineman’s character also felt pretty screwed over a needless dye job. Ouch.
This sketch arrives at a time when method acting has increasingly been put on blast. Most recently, Brian Cox called out Jeremy Strong’s adherence to the practice as “f*cking annoying,” and Jared Leto has been confirmed to have made a spectacle of himself during pee breaks while filming Morbius.
In light of this, a 450-pound weight gain does roll out as ridiculous as it looks on SNL, yet Harrelson only had to commit to a fat suit to pull off this sketch. Whew.
