Bill Skarsgard Ate Steak Tartare, Raw Eggs and No Sugar to Train for ‘The Crow’: ‘He’s a Machine of Destruction’

Bill Skarsgard got into incredible shape for his starring role in Lionsgate’s “The Crow,” and he’s revealed some of his intense diet and exercise regime for the role.

He shot the indie action film “Boy Kills World,” in which he stars as a brutal, mute fighter who’s got some serious John Wick-style moves, right before “The Crow,” so he was already packing on a lot of muscle. He kept up the same protein-packed, restricted diet and workout plan to stay in top shape heading into “The Crow.”

“I’d take Bill out to dinner. I’d always just order for him because I knew what he was eating,” “The Crow” director Rupert Sanders told Variety at the New York premiere Tuesday night. “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.”

Skarsgard plays Eric Draven, aka the supernatural antihero The Crow, in Lionsgate’s reboot of the cult classic 1994 movie, which starred the late Brandon Lee. After Eric and his girlfriend Shelly (FKA Twigs) are viciously murdered, he’s brought back to life by a mysterious crow entity to seek vengeance. When Skarsgard becomes the Crow later in the movie, his full muscular transformation is finally on display.

“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,” Skarsgard said. “It was a tricky one, because they wanted the Crow to be ripped, but the character Eric shouldn’t be. 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.”

One intense scene has Skarsgard’s Crow infiltrate an opera house and slaughter dozens of henchmen to reach the man who orchestrated his murder. Sanders called the sequence the “craziest day on set.”

“There was a lot of complex stunt work, and Bill did so much of it himself,” he said. “As you can see, he’s an incredibly physical person. His body in the movie is incredible. 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.”

Once filming was over, Skarsgard celebrated the end of his diet with 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.”

Meanwhile, Twigs, who plays Eric’s girlfriend Shelly and is the motivation for his bloody revenge quest, had a very different workout routine.

“I didn’t do any of the stunts, so I went raving in Prague and kind of just immersed myself in the subcultures of Prague for my physical training,” she said. “I raved, I was on the dance floor. I think Bill did something very different.”