January means more than just post-New Year’s hangover: in the land of Hollywood and entertainment, it means “awards season.” And that’s good news for Emile Hirsch, who just snagged a Critics Choice nomination for his work in Into the Wild (directed by Sean Penn), playing a headstrong dreamer who shucks off civilization, embarks on a Thoreau-like adventure into the wilderness, and risks starvation to find inner-peace.
It’s quite a change of pace for Hirsch, who earlier pushed drugs in Alpha Dog and tore up the skateboarding world in Lords of Dogtown. As an Oscar nomination looms, Hirsch sat down for a quick chat with CP.
Clubplanet: You lost a ton of weight for this part. What was your secret?
Emile Hirsch: Willingness to punish oneself. It was working out. Not-eating is just hard. And you can’t do anything else if you’re not eating. That’s all you can do, and I had to be doing so much stuff while we were going through this process. It was just jumping on the treadmill and hitting an hour, like every day. I went from 156 pounds when I got the part to 115 pounds at my lowest weight, so that’s 41 pounds
Has it changed your life?
Emile Hirsch: Absolutely it has. It really lit the spirit of adventure inside me, and I hope it never goes away. And a lot of the physical aspects of it have stuck with me; I still run a lot, and I never ran before—ever—before the film.
What do you like most about your character?
Emile Hirsch: I always marveled at how self-reliant Chris was. I aspire to be more self-reliant. He’s a guy who can find his own food. He can hunt and fish and take care of himself completely. And not just in a modern society take-care-of-yourself way, like “okay you do your laundry, and you live in your apartment on your own, and you clean your apartment,” we’re talking a much different self-reliance. The Alaskan wilderness.
You worked with Justin Timberlake in Alpha Dog and now Vince Vaughn in this. How was the camaraderie?
Emile Hirsch: I have fun with almost every actor I work with. Working with Justin was an awesome experience; he’s very talented, very funny.
And Vince?
Emile Hirsch: He’s hysterical. We had a great time. But he’s also a very serious person. I’ve never met anyone who’s just purely comedic or just purely dramatic. That’s a myth. A lot of the funniest people you’ll talk to behind closed doors will be some of the most serious people you’ll every talk to. It’s incredible.
The actual shoot itself looked like hell: any moments where you actually feared for your life?
Emile Hirsch: We were in all different types climates. It’d be really cold in Alaska and we’d be climbing a snowy mountain one day. Snow-mobiling around. On the first day, me and Sean [Penn] actually flew off of our snow-mobile together. On the first day. And the whole crew was running up to us saying, “Are you okay!??! Are you okay?!??” And Sean turns back to me and says, “That was good how you jumped off the bike when we were flying off. It’s good how you kind of lunged off. It’s safe, so it won’t roll on you.” And I’m like, “So you’re trying to turn our snow-mobile wreck into a lesson on how to crash properly.” Every climate brought a different challenge. We’d be in Lake Mead when it was like 120 degrees. One guy got heat stroke and kept vomiting and had to quit.
How’d you prep for the role?
Emile Hirsch: As much as the physical training was important—running, weight-lifting, hiking—there was also a mental exercising of reading a lot of very rigid hours. Always reading every day, whether it would be Jack London’s Call of the Wild, Henry David Thoreau and reading Walden and getting into that world. That kind of mental discipline would turn out to be really, really important throughout the whole shoot.
Did you get reflective?
Emile Hirsch: Absolutely. When you’re reading about the world in a different way than which you’re accustomed to seeing it, it really expands your mind a little bit, I think. It definitely had me look at who I was in a different way, and the world I’m in. And even the world of LA and Hollywood. When you’re reading Thoreau you look at Hollywood different. Let me tell you. [Laughs.]
Any modern-society conveniences that you missed at times?
Emile Hirsch: A trailer. [Laughs.] We’d be at the bus, and it’d be like, you have 45 minutes to set up the shot, and I’d literally go lie on the mattress in the bus, and just pull up in my sleeping bag and shiver away.
What “truths” can you take away from the film?
Emile Hirsch: The film believes in humanity, forgiveness, and love. I feel that those aren’t just points of view; those are truths. I believe in love. I think love is a truth. I don’t think it’s an opinion.