Any day now, Taylor Kitsch will cut his hair. To transform into the title character in John Carter of Mars—Wall-E director Andrew Stanton’s first live-action feature, based on Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burrough’s sci-fi novels about a Civil War veteran’s adventures on the Red Planet—the 28-year-old actor, who plays the dreamy, brooding, beer-drinking, football-playing Tim Riggins on NBC’s cult drama Friday Night Lights, will lop off his locks for the first time since he was 19. “Hopefully, it’s a 10-year job,” Kitsch says of the potential franchise, which co-stars Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton and Thomas Haden Church.

Even though the motorcycle-riding actor has spent four seasons playing high-level pigskin on TV, and was a serious hockey player in college (it was only after he busted his knee that he took up acting), the intense preparation leading up to John Carter exceeds anything he’s done before. It includes sword training, gun fighting, horseback riding and seven-hour cram sessions on the Civil War. And while learning to fence with four-armed giant green Martians might not be every actor’s idea of the method, Kitsch uses physicality as entrée into psyche. “It makes it a bit easier,” he says. “I have to look like this, walk like this. I have to lose this much weight. I’ll know this inside out. Then I work on the mental state.”

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SOURCE: Blackbookmag.com