10 Movie-Making Experiences That Made Cast & Crew Plant-Based

For most of us, the fiction of a movie is pretty much where it ends, but there is always a complex network of happenings that go into film production, with the cast and crew working tirelessly to realize a shared vision. And sometimes, these experiences change the people involved—either by force or because they have had their eyes opened to a new way of living.

One of the biggest changes is dietary, with actors often bulking up or slimming down depending on the requirements of their roles. With today’s growing popularity of plant-based living, it’s no surprise that this is a concern for many in the industry.

Indeed, there are numerous productions that have adopted a vegetarian and vegan approach for their cast and crew. Some of these films carry a plant-based message, while others are explicitly not about vegetarianism or veganism at all; however, each has had an impact on those working on them. For certain cast and crew members, this was only a temporary change, due to conditions or unexpected interactions, and for others, it was a permanent transition, shifting their mindset forever.

Related: 10 Misdirections Directors Used to Manipulate Actors

10 Bong Joon Ho, Okja (2017)

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s films often carry a social message, whether addressing class struggles in Parasite (2019), government failure in The Host (2006), or animal rights in Okja.

The latter follows teenage Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun), a rural farm girl who lives with and nurtures her genetically modified super-pig Okja. When Okja is kidnapped by the U.S. meat company, the Mirando Corporation, who wants to harvest her flesh, Mija is forced to undertake an intercontinental rescue mission to get her back.

The thematic content of the movie is written on the wall, but although Bong was sympathetic enough to make the film, he was still a meat-eater when he embarked on the project. However, when he and producer Dooho Choi visited a Colorado slaughterhouse to gather the details for the film’s slaughterhouse segments, they both found themselves repulsed by the smell and suffering of the place. As a result of this overwhelming experience, Bong felt compelled to convert to veganism for the following two months.^[1]

9 Sam Fell, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)

After 23 years, the people at legendary stop-motion studio Aardman Animations finally got the financial support to bring Chicken Run back—this time with Netflix.

One of the first film’s two directors, Peter Lord, sought out ParaNorman (2012) director Sam Fell and convinced him to breathe a bit of contemporary life and style into the sequel. In it, anthropomorphized chickens Rocky and Ginger (Zachary Levi and Thandiwe Newton) lead a daring rescue mission to save their daughter from Fun-Land Farms, an advanced poultry processing plant run by their original enemy, Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson). The film’s refreshingly honest approach to factory farming, despite being a children’s film, made it a hit with the plant-based community.

While some of the cast and crew, including Newton and Bella Ramsey, were already vegetarians and vegans, Fell was not. However, his experience of making Dawn of the Nugget and seeing things from our feathered friends’ perspective caused him to change his ways for good, going vegetarian—never mind that they were still serving chicken every Wednesday in the production’s canteen.^[2]

8 Natalie Portman, Brothers (2009)

Brothers stars Tobey Maguire as Sam Cahill, an Afghanistan war veteran, and Jake Gyllenhaal as his younger brother Tommy, a reckless and headstrong criminal. When Sam is apparently killed in action, Tommy steps in to provide continuity in the lives of Sam’s wife, Grace (Natalie Portman), and her children. However, when Sam returns alive, the new relationship between his brother and his wife causes some major issues for all involved.

Jim Sheridan’s drama about the devastating after-effects of war on the individual, the family, and society is not exactly a pro-veggie film. In fact, it has nothing to do with plant-based eating whatsoever—but that doesn’t mean the movie-making experience didn’t generate the circumstances necessary to create a new vegan.

This is because, as a lifelong vegan, Maguire brought his ideology to set. Portman, already vegetarian, was persuaded by the Spider-Man star to go vegan, and thanks to Maguire having his own vegan chef as a core member of his entourage, she was able to share in the spoils and transition her diet during filming without having to think about.^[3]

7 Chris Hemsworth, Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame (2018; 2019)

As Captain America, Star-Lord, and Thor, Chrises Evans, Pratt, and Hemsworth have all gone to extreme lengths to transform their physiques while working for Marvel. But just because the outcome is rippling biceps and washboard abs, that doesn’t mean they’ve all gone about it the same way.

As Thor, Hemsworth has always been one of the brawniest members of the MCU, but for the epic ensemble double-bill Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, he wanted to try something different from his usual training and diet routine. With his muscle already built up from the previous seven years spent playing the character, Hemsworth and his trainer decided to see if they could maintain his bulk and mass while transitioning to an entirely vegan diet. And it worked!

The actor relied mostly on beans, quinoa, and legumes for his protein, eating six times a day. But, despite the success he enjoyed while eating this way throughout the shoot, Hemsworth ultimately didn’t transition to veganism after the end of filming due to the huge quantity of additional food he needed to eat—and his love of steak.^[4]

6 The Entire Cast & Crew, Patel Ki Punjabi Shaadi (2017)

Bollywood director Sanjay Chhel has spent the last three decades putting his name to movies and shows primarily made for the Indian market, and his Hindi-language rom-com Patel Ki Punjabi Shaadi is no different. Using a classic culture shock setup, the film tells the story of two Punjabi and Gujarati fathers (Rishi Kapoor and Paresh Rawal) whose children are to get married and whose norms and approaches to family life clash.

The two-hour film was shot both on set and location, including one key scene filmed in a real pandal (marquee) erected for Navratri, the dancing festival celebrated by Gujaratis in honor of the goddess Durga. Gujaratis are predominantly vegetarians, and because Chhel himself is Gujarati, the cast and crew only ate vegetarian meals while filming as a mark of respect for the location and the director.

Even though they returned to their regular diets after filming ceased, the director was overwhelmed by and thankful for the gesture, as it helped defuse some of the charged atmosphere on set created by the cultural subject matter.^[5]

5 Constance Marie, Selena (1997)

Gregory Nava’s biopic Selena featured Jennifer Lopez in her first major starring role, playing Tejano music star Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. The film charts Selena’s rise to fame and sudden, shocking death at the hands of Yolanda Saldívar (Lupe Ontiveros). Saldívar was the president of the singer’s fan club and manager of her boutiques, who embezzled money from both organizations and who killed Selena as an act of jealous revenge for outing her crimes.

Constance Marie features in a smaller role as Marcella Samora-Quintanilla, Selena’s mother, and despite the reduced scope of her role, the production had a lasting impact on her life.

During a scene in which Marcella reprimands a younger Selena for not taking care of her chicken, Marie had to hold a live chicken for around five hours while the cameras got coverage for the scene. As a result of being so close to the animal, feeling its warmth and heartbeat, the actor developed an attachment that went beyond this one individual and subsequently became a vegetarian, as she couldn’t bear to think of eating it.^[6]

4 Thandiwe Newton, Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story may have bombed in the cinema (by Disney’s standards, at least), but the production had a lasting impact on some of its cast members.

The film takes us into the life of a young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich), years away from his noble skirmishes as a Rebel when he was just a smuggler, working with a rag-tag crew of rogues and thieves to pull off heists of precious hyper-fuels. The gang includes his big, hairy Wookiee pal, Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), his mentor, Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), and Tobias’s partner in criminality and life, Val (Thandiwe Newton).

Now, Harrelson is a notorious vegan, having advocated for the diet for years, publicly and privately. And as Newton was paired with Harrelson throughout pretty much all her filming for Solo, he was able to exert his influence on her. His arguments for a vegan diet won her over, persuading Newton to turn vegan then and there. In the years since, she has become a public voice for animal rights.^[7]

3 The Entire Cast & Crew (Again), We Are Boats (2018)

Riding high on the name-and-face recognition of Westworld, We Are Boats brings together two of the show’s stars, Luke Hemsworth and Angela Sarafyan, for a supernatural drama about life, death, and love.

The story centers around Francesca (Sarafyan), a pregnant young woman whose sudden murder at the hands of her boyfriend doesn’t prevent her from putting in a hard day’s work, returning as a spirit being to help the living fulfill their destinies.

The production staff went out of their way to make the film as equitable and ethical as possible, with a cast that is approximately 50% female and 40% people of color, a 45% female crew, and 100% female producers. But that’s not all: We Are Boats also implemented a completely vegan set on which no animals were eaten or worn by cast or crew, either on screen or off.^[8]

2 James Cromwell, Babe (1995)

If you were a ’90s kid, Babe was a staple of your cinematic diet. The story of a pig being trained as a sheepdog captured hearts across the globe, presenting a double-handed narrative in which farmer Arthur Hoggett (James Cromwell) trains Babe while the young pig (who can communicate across all animal boundaries except human) navigates the farmyard politics.

And while the film stands proudly on its own merits, it is doubly famous for what went on behind the scenes, namely the late-in-life transition to veganism of Cromwell, its lead actor.

Already a vegetarian of 20 years, Cromwell was struck by the hypocrisy on the set of Babe—a film supposedly celebrating animals’ lives, abilities, and consciousness—when they would break to eat, and the same kinds of animals they were filming would be there on the lunch table. As a result, he went vegan and renounced his use of all animal products.

But he didn’t stop with just his possessions or diet. Cromwell has been a vocal advocate for animal rights and protections for the past three decades, and now, in his eighties, shows no signs of changing.^[9]

1 The Entire Cast & Crew (Again!), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

James Cameron is not just a filmmaker but also an inventor and innovator who has leveraged the production of some of his biggest movies to advance new technologies and methods of working.

While most of us remember the first Avatar for its groundbreaking new 3D that brought the alien moon Pandora and its blue-skinned inhabitants to life, there was another matter at play. Already a conscious environmentalist, Cameron was hard at work trying to make his production as environmentally friendly as possible while promoting a message of anti-industrialism in its narrative.

Twelve years later, when making the film’s sequel, Avatar: Way of Water, he went one step further. New science had come to the fore proving that the biggest way to reduce environmental impact is via a plant-based diet, and Cameron drew on the expertise of his wife, Suzy Amis Cameron, who runs the first ever vegan K–12 school in the U.S., to make the Way of Water the first Hollywood blockbuster to serve only plant-based food on set.^[10]