Bill Skarsgård Ate Raw Eggs and Avoided Sugar to Get 'Ripped' forThe Crow: 'He's a Machine of Destruction'

Mar. 15, 2025

Bill Skarsgård at the world premiere of The Crow.Photo:ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty; Larry Horricks for Lionsgate

ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty; Larry Horricks for Lionsgate

Bill Skarsgårdhad a strict diet and exercise regimen to get “ripped” forThe Crow,a remake of the 1994 film starringBrandon Lee.

“I’d already been training for quite a while. Me and my trainer kept adding a little bit of weight onto what I’d already be, but I didn’t want to be too big either,” Skarsgård explained.

“It was a tricky one, because they wanted the Crow to be ripped, but the character Eric shouldn’t be,” he said. “I didn’t feel like the character should be thin, but you can’t afford to split it into six months, the ‘Raging Bull’ kind of way. So we did a lot of weight training and ate a lot of protein.”

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Bill Skarsgård in The Crow.Larry Horricks for Lionsgate

Larry Horricks for Lionsgate

“I’d take Bill out to dinner. I’d always just order for him because I knew what he was eating,” he said. “It’s basically steak tartare and raw eggs. He was in the gym a lot. He ate very healthily and put us all to shame when we were eating burgers and hot dogs and working late at night in the Czech summer.”

Sanders added that there’s a lot of complex stunt work in the film, but because of Skarsgård’s fitness routine, he was able to do most of it himself.

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“As you can see, he’s an incredibly physical person. His body in the movie is incredible,” he said. “When he’s on, he’s a real machine of destruction, but also he played these incredible moments of softness and empathy, which really just give the action sequences a lot more of an emotional connection, which is why I think people are really responding to them. They’re not just gratuitous violence. You really feel that you’re in there with the character.”

Skarsgård toldVarietythat although his diet for the film was intense, it didn’t bother him too much. However, he was excited to celebrate the end of filmingThe Crowwith a beer.

“I really loved what I was eating, so I didn’t feel like I had to cheat,” he said. “I didn’t eat sugar, but I’m not a big sweet guy. I guess my biggest cheat would be an alcoholic beer. I celebrated after the shoot.”

source: people.com