While Carson Palmer was a solid quarterback during his peak years in the early to mid-2000s, the amount of money teams have shelled out to him was not worth the performance he put up throughout his fifteen season NFL career. In the seventh grade, Palmer was getting attention for his size and arm strength later he would commit to the University of Southern California. Palmer would play for the Trojans from 1998-2002 and win the Heisman Trophy and lead his team to a 2003 Orange Bowl victory over Iowa. Palmer would put up career numbers including 11,818 passing yards and 72 touchdowns with a passer percentage rate of 59.1%.
After an impressive collegiate career at USC, Palmer was drafted 1st overall in the 2003 NFL Draft by the Cincinnati Bengals were he would play his best football in his professional career. Palmer led the Bengals to their first playoff appearance in fifteen years in 2005 and also led the team to the postseason an additional time in 2009. In 2005, Palmer signed a six-year, $97 million contract extension with the Bengals but ended up receiving only $84 million from the Ohio-based franchise. Carson also received $15 million for two years of service with the Oakland Raiders and $73 million for five years of service with the Arizona Cardinals. Palmer retired after the 2017 NFL season and left with his pocket lined with more than $174 million.
Celebrities are no strangers to changing their looks for a role. And in some instances, they have to get pretty extreme. From 500-calorie-a-day diets to drinking pints of ice cream, Actors and actresses know what it takes to change their bodies in preparation for a new film.
Charlize Theron is no stranger to gaining and losing weight for movie roles, as we remember her transformation in Monster. Charlize Theron gained close to 50 pounds for her role as Marlo in Tully. Theron said that “for the first time in my life I was eating so much processed foods and I drank way too much sugar. … I remember having to set my alarm in the middle of the night in order to just maintain the weight.”
You’re used Chris Hemsworth's hulk-like figure in Thor, but In the Heart of the Sea required a totally different diet. The movie required the cast members lose a ton of weight to make their stuck-at-sea plight more believable. Chris Hemsworth said there were days when all he ate was one boiled egg, a couple of crackers, and a celery stick.
Anne Hathaway wanted to get serious for her role in Les Misérables, as she was playing Fantine, a starving prostitute with tuberculosis. So Anne Hathaway went on a diet of “rabbit food” to drop 25 pounds. Hathaway explained her diet was essentially just starving herself, but she didn’t want to give details, as she doesn’t want to encourage anyone to copy her emaciated look. She did note that she “just had to stop eating for a total of 13 days shooting,” however. And at one point, her bones became so frail that she reportedly broke her arm.
Matthew McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club, a man with HIV/AIDS, was spot-on, earning him the title of best actor at the Oscars. But it also required a serious physical transformation. Matthew McConaughey said he lost 38 pounds for the role. During filming, he said he lost a lot of energy from eating so little — and he hit plenty of plateaus along the way. Finally, with a strict diet, he got down to 143 pounds. And while he did cardio to help with the weight loss, he said it was 90% what he was eating and portion size.
Hilary Swank had to put on 23 pounds of pure muscle for her role as a boxer in Million Dollar Baby. The process doesn’t sound easy, however. “I started working out five hours a day — I had to eat 210 grams of protein a day,” Swank said. She also mentioned that she had to consume 60 egg whites per day, and when that proved too difficult, she had to drink them. And to keep the muscle on, she would get up and drink protein shakes in the middle of the night.