Stranger Things star David Harbour has explained how he managed to shed five stone for season 4 and it doesn’t sound pretty.
The actor, who plays Jim Hopper on the blockbuster Netflix series, dropped 75 pounds (five stone) for the latest season, which saw Hopper extremely gaunt after being stuck in a Siberian prison camp.
Although a strict exercise regime might have made sense for how he was able to undertake the weight loss for the role, it turns out he instead cut out food.
‘I found the trick. It’s really interesting and it’s a simple technique,’ he revealed while appearing on The Late Late Show with James Corden.
‘You just stop eating food.’
James had been asking David for his tips and exclaimed that it sounded like a ‘nightmare’ having to take that approach.
‘You see all of these diets and fads but the key to losing weight is not eating food and it sucks,’ David added.
‘The whole time it sucks.’
But David did add that he had also worked out and done it in a ‘healthy way’.
However his hard work had come undone when it came to playing Santa in the new Christmas movie Violent Night.
‘I got really skinny and healthy [for Stranger Things],’ he said.
‘Then I got told I was playing Santa in Silent Night and I went out and brought a box of doughnuts and two pints of ice cream and I saw down with a fork and knife like I was going to work.
‘It’s clearly better to just play Santa.’
Despite his excitement at being able to binge on food a little, David said earlier this year he was ‘struggling to fight back down towards a good weight for wherever Hopper ends up in season 5′.
‘All this up and down is not good for the body, and I’ll have to give it up soon, but it is such a fun part of the job to live in a different version of your skin for a while,’ he posted on Instagram.
We won’t have to wait long to see how he went though, with the final season of Stranger Things set to air mid-2023.
The Late Late Show with James Corden airs on CBS in the US. Stranger Things is streaming on Netflix.