Emile HIRSCH woke up at the edge of his bed after weeks of filming "Into the Wild," shouting into what he thought was the Grand Canyon, convinced that director Sean Penn and his crew had abandoned him to test his endurance.
"Sean's really pushing me now," he thought. "How could they do this to me?"
Even after he registered the blank hotel room walls around him, Hirsch wasn't sure what town he was in. The months-long shoot had taken them to dozens of locations from Mexico to Alaska. It was all starting to wear on him.
But it wasn't like Penn didn't warn him. As Hirsch recalled it, Penn was visibly relieved when he accepted the part. "You're a good guy," Penn told him. "You've got a good head on your shoulders. . . . I'd feel bad about what I was going to put you through if you were really tortured at the get-go."
"Into the Wild," which opened Friday, set a new threshold for Hirsch. He dropped a quarter of his body weight for the part of real-life adventurer Christopher McCandless, who in 1990 set out alone on a two-year cross-country trek, eventually heading for the Alaskan wilderness only to starve to death four months after he got there. Hirsch ran 20 miles a week. He canoed river rapids. He came face-to-fangs with a grizzly, take after take. He carried a 30-pound pack much of each day. Even in waist-deep snow. And he joined the small crew in a weeklong campout on the Colorado River -- macho stuff for an actor whose most daring on-screen challenge up to that point had been shaving his head for "Lords of Dogtown." And as that film's director, Catherine Hardwicke, remembered it, even that took some serious coaxing.
But Hirsch said he was so pumped up while filming "Into the Wild" that the physical exhaustion, the fact that he was working for one of his idols, the fact that the role could launch him as a leading man, didn't really get to him. He just felt lucky.
"I believed in what I was doing so much that I was never really nervous in ways that I've been on other projects," he said. "I was always like, 'Wow. I can't believe [Penn] hired me.' "
Indeed, Penn had envisioned Leonardo DiCaprio in the part 10 years ago, when he first read the book. But by the time he got the movie rights, DiCaprio was too old for the role. Hirsch, however, was just the right age. "On the cusp of going from boy to man," Penn said.
