Top 5 Crazy Ways Actors Prepared For Sex Work Roles

Actors have long taken extreme measures to add authenticity to a performance, but portraying a sex worker requires a particular vulnerability. The lives of prostitutes, strippers, and porn stars are not just physically complicated but also mentally and emotionally taxing, making them some of the juiciest and most sought-after roles. Actors will go to great lengths to convincingly inhabit sex workers, but how far is too far?

5. Halle Berry In Jungle Fever 1991

Director Spike Lee wanted to cast Halle Berry as Wesley Snipes’s wife in this interracial drama. But Berry, weary of being typecast from her experience in beauty pageants and soap operas, insisted that her feature film debut must be as Vivian, a crack ho. Berry’s on-screen companion was played by Samuel L. Jackson, who had spent time in rehab for crack cocaine, so Berry had to get inventive to rise to the occasion.
To inhabit Vivian, Berry spent time in crack dens and did not shower for 10 days during production. When Wendy Williams doubted Berry’s hygiene lapse in an interview, the actress responded, “Ask Sam Jackson! He had to get a whiff of it . . . constantly!”
With her role in Jungle Fever, Berry paved the way for her more controversial roles such as in Monster’s Ball for which she won the 2001 Academy Award.

4. Mark Wahlberg In Boogie Nights 1997

Director Paul Thomas Anderson dove headfirst into the porn world by spending a year with porn legend Ron Jeremy, but prospective star Mark Wahlberg was reluctant to read the script. After the then-recent disaster of Showgirls and fresh off a career as an underwear model, Wahlberg wasn’t interested in portraying a rising 1970s porn star.

Anderson got Wahlberg to acquiesce, but Wahlberg’s on-set experience wasn’t exactly easy. To get in character, he had to wear a prosthetic penis, of which he said, “You have this weird guy putting it on, there’s no way to go to the bathroom.”

The first time the prosthetic was applied, it was to the measurements of famed porn actor John Holmes who is 15 centimeters (6 in) taller than Wahlberg. “So this thing went down past my knee. [ . . . ] You’d sit down, and the thing would bounce up,” Wahlberg explained. He endured this clownish humiliation in front of the entire cast and crew. But apparently, Mark Wahlberg’s prosthetic penis grew on him (pun intended) because he kept it, saying, “Maybe at some point, I can sell it at auction for charity.

3. Jodie Foster In Taxi Driver 1976

Jodie Foster’s mother never thought that her daughter would get the role of underage prostitute Iris because Foster had auditioned for Martin Scorsese’s gritty drama in her school uniform. But Scorsese chose Foster to play opposite troubled Vietnam vet Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). Foster was a tomboy who hated wearing Iris’s halter tops and short shorts, but other parts of the rehearsal process proved more challenging.

In addition to spending time with real street girls, Foster went on several outings with her costar. De Niro was a committed method actor who took her out to diners as a mentally ill man growing increasingly unstable at society’s decadence.

Foster states that this was awkward, even to an eye-rolling degree, but “he really helped me understand improvisation and building a character in a way that was almost nonverbal.” At the tender age of 13, Foster was hoisted into the seedy world of Taxi Driver, but it was a role that launched her career.

2. Anne Hathaway In Les Miserables 2012

Anne Hathaway wasn’t asked to audition for the role of 19th-century prostitute Fantine in this sprawling class-and-morality tale of the French Resistance because Hathaway was too young. But somehow, she finagled what turned out to be a three-hour audition where she sang several of the famed songs and performed Fantine’s crucial death scene for director Tom Hooper.

Once cast, Hathaway read Victor Hugo’s original 1,400-page novel and researched the period’s sexual slavery. To become Fantine, Hathaway lost 11 kilograms (25 lb) by going on a cleanse and then eating only two thin squares of dried oatmeal paste a day for 15 days.

After they wrapped, Hathaway remarked, “It was definitely a little nuts. It was definitely a break with reality, but I think that’s who Fantine is anyway.”

1. Emily Browning In Sleeping Beauty 2011

In this Australian film, Emily Browning plays Lucy, a university student who takes a job with a mysterious group that caters to rich men. After proving herself initially as a caterer in lingerie, Lucy is promoted to a new role where she will be voluntarily sedated and sleep naked while male clients lie beside her, enacting their romantic fantasies. The rules forbid intercourse, but the atmosphere is still violating.
In preparation for the role, Browning meditated and used the Alexander Technique to focus on body stillness. Every day before shooting, she swam in the ocean at 5:00 AM.
On set, she wore prosthetic skin and eventually learned not to wince when a male client burned a cigarette on her neck in 14 separate takes. As her character spends less time asleep and flirts with vengeance, Browning torches money on camera, an experience she calls “amazing.”