Jack Huston adopted strict diet to perfect Ben-Hur slave look

Actor Jack Huston lost 30 pounds (13.6 kilograms) to play a Jewish prince-turned-slave in the Ben-Hur revamp.
The Boardwalk Empire star tackles the role late movie icon Charlton Heston played in the 1959 epic in the new film and admits he went on a strict diet to look the part.
“I wanted to make a very clear physical and emotional change in the character,” he tells Latino Review. “The life expectancy of a slave back then (in biblical times) in the galley of a slave ship would have been between three and six months. Five years would have been absolutely brutal. I lost 30 pounds for that part of the movie. I went down to it.
“(I made) a very conscious decision to try and almost change everything… from my voice to the way I look, the way I move, the way I hold myself.”
Jack felt he had a spiritual helping hand on the set of the film, which was shot on location in Italy and at the Rome studios where his grandfather John Huston shot The Bible: In the Beginning in the early 1960s.
“Cinecitta (studios) is one of those places that anyone would be lucky to film at,” he beams. “Rome… amazing. It was… You feel the history. I really felt it. It was like a big hug being there.
“It gave me, I’d say, a little more drive every day that you can’t help but feel that someone’s watching over you sometimes. I felt like it was a like a bit of a pat on the back and, like, he (grandfather) was (there)… I know the risk that he would have taken and done what he did. I felt honoured to be there and filming that.”
Jack Huston’s Ben-Hur hits cinemas in the U.S. on Friday (19Aug16).