Stanley Tucci, for example, earned an Oscar nomination for his role in The Lovely Bones, where he played killer George Harvey. Despite this industry acknowledgment, Stanley has insisted that he wouldn’t take a character like that on again.
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight at the time, he said: “I would not play George Harvey again in The Lovely Bones, which was horrible. It’s a wonderful movie, but it was a tough experience. Simply because of the role.”
Meanwhile, Kate Winslet won an Oscar for her portrayal of a former Nazi camp worker in The Reader, and she told HuffPost that she struggled to come to terms with her character long after filming had wrapped.
“We wrapped on July 12, and I sort of walked away like some car crash victim who somehow hadn’t been hurt on the outside, but I felt like I couldn’t speak [about it]. It was truly overwhelming,” she explained. “I really went somewhere. I was in some kind of a trance. And I’m still coming to terms with all of it. I’m so blown away by the movie.”
And Sophie Turner told The Cut that she believes she’ll “exhibit some symptoms of trauma” after filming incredibly harrowing scenes as a child actor on Game of Thrones, which she said she didn’t really “comprehend” at the time.
Meanwhile, Zendaya previously articulated why these performances can be so damaging for actors as she reflected on her role as Rue in Euphoria.
In an interview with Elle Australia, she explained: “Your body is a person; it doesn’t know that what you’re doing is not real. My brain can say: ‘OK, I’m pretending,’ but when I’m doing it, my body and my heart don’t know that it’s not real.”