Mišel Matičević
Gaining or losing weight is “part of the job”
For his role in “Billion Dollar Code”, Mišel Matičević gained 20 kilos.
© imago / Future Image
For his role in “The Billion Dollar Code”, Mišel Matičević gained 20 kilos. For him, gaining and losing weight is “just part of the job”.
For the preparation of his roles, Mišel Matičević (51) gives a lot of physical effort, among other things. The actor is known to drastically change his body weight for roles. For example for the role of the programmer Juri Müller in the Netflix series “The Billion Dollar Code”, which has been on the streaming service since October. Of the 20 kilos he gained, Matičević has already lost ten kilos, like him reveals in an interview with the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”. “I still have to get rid of ten. That’s disgusting,” says the 51-year-old, who can be seen on December 16 in the Becker biopic “The Rebel – From Leimen to Wimbledon” as Ion Tiriac (82) on RTL.
The doctor advised against extreme weight changes
For Mišel Matičević, extreme physical changes are “just part of the work” of an actor, he explains. “It’s not the first time either. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Over and over again.” But he also emphasizes that physical change alone does not make you a good actor. “But when a figure is 20 kilos more or less, a bald head or a beard, that’s just part of it.” The problem in Germany is that actors do not get paid for such transformations in contrast to the US film industry.
“If Christian Bale loses 30 kilos for ‘The Machinist’, he’ll get five million for it. After that, he doesn’t have to worry about how he can regain his strength. But I have to think about whether I continue to do this excessively,” says Matičević in a FAS interview. A doctor told him to “let it be slow”. “Up to 10 kilos more or less than normal weight is okay, everything that’s over should I do with supervision.”
That is why “Method Acting” is the right thing for Mišel Matičević
For Mišel Matičević, such physical transformations are especially important because they allow him to approach his roles better – also in terms of character. “Of course you move differently, walk differently, sit differently. But just as important is the inner change in order to be this person.” A role he slips into should end up “having nothing to do with me”.
It is all the more difficult for the actor to switch off after filming. “Depending on how intense it was, the character accompanies me even after the film is finished,” he describes. Some roles accompanied him up to ten weeks after the shooting. In Germany you are quickly laughed at if you say “method acting”, but Matičević feels that the acting method is the right one for himself. “It helps me to get to the point where, in the best case scenario, I can really change.”
Christian Bale (47) in “Der Maschinist” and Robert De Niro (78) in the film “Wie ein Wilder Stier” (1980) are among the greatest “Method Acting” performances. De Niro gained almost 30 kilos for the role of Jake LaMotta. For Mišel Matičević he is “the best example of our time”. He “forgot that this is De Niro”. “For me that was LaMotta. In every fiber of his body.”