I start to mention the most famous story about Ben Foster, and Ben Foster starts to roll his eyes. It’s an anecdote that crops up in nearly every interview with the American actor, one that dates back to the 2013 war drama Lone Survivor. On set one day, in a quest for earthy verisimilitude, Foster began eating handfuls of dirt. “It wasn’t handfuls”, he later claimed, explaining that he had simply balked at the idea of navy seals displaying pearly-white “Hollywood teeth”.
There are other similarly regurgitated stories of Foster’s Method-acting bent: the time he took performance-enhancing drugs before playing Lance Armstrong, or when he deformed his own tooth with a power drill before playing a hillbilly bank robber in Hell or High Water (2016). (Here with me today, Foster’s teeth appear back in Hollywood fettle.) When these stories are strung together, I say to him, doesn’t it make your work sound a bit, well, preposterous?
