14 DAY TRIAL // “The Hunger Games” is en route to becoming the biggest release of recent years, writing a new chapter in the lives of its main three stars. Liam Hemsworth is one of them and, while he's looking forward to the future, he also wants people to know his role wasn't that easy to pull off.
Liam, the younger brother of Chris Hemsworth, he of the “Thor” and “Avengers” fame, plays Gale in the film based on the popular trilogy by Suzanne Collins.
As a resident of the impoverished District 12, Gale is not buff. He's athletic because he's a hunter, but he can't be too massive, Liam points out in a brand new interview with Men's Health.
As such, the intensive training he started, in order to get in shape for the film, he countered with a very strict and restricted diet, which was aimed to help him become toned without gaining weight.
“I lost quite a bit of weight for the role. My character lives in District 12 in the film, which is basically like living in the Depression. He’s hunting for his food everyday and trying to provide for himself and his family. He’s not eating a lot,” the actor says.
“He doesn’t have a lot of money to buy food. I wanted to get a good sense of what it’s like to be hungry. I was training five or six days a week, and eating a lot less. When we started shooting, I wasn’t training as much, but I was eating only very minimally,” Liam underlines.
In almost no time, he was surviving on just one meal a day, but training was just as intensive as ever.
“For the month leading up to shooting, it was very clean, healthy food. When we started shooting, I would have one meal a day. It wasn’t that it was even very healthy. It was whatever I could get, and not a lot of it,” adds Liam.
An ex-Navy SEAL helped him get in shape for the part – and Liam describes the routine as one of the most difficult he ever had to do.
After the high-intensity daily workout (one-hour sessions), Liam had to sit down and catch his breath for a while, he recalls. If he did anything else, he'd risk passing out on the spot.
“He’d get me to lift various things or take me out to the car park and we’d get a sled kind of thing and he’d load it up with weights and I’d have to push it for 50 meters and then run 50 meters and then pick up two-deep kettle bells and walk those 50 meters. It was just about destroying me for an hour everyday,” the handsome young star jokes.