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No pain, no gain for Ben Foster – Metro US

No pain, no gain for Ben Foster

“My brain’s broken today,” Ben Foster warns, detailing the schedule that comes with shooting a movie, editing another and promoting one more simultaneously. “I came from New Orleans yesterday, I was up at 3:30 in the morning, went to New York to go watch footage of a film I just produced, got on a plane three hours later, got here at 2 a.m. I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

What we’re talking about is the latest movie he stars in — “The Mechanic,” a stunt-laden action film that took the 30-year-old actor a bit out of his comfort zone. In fact, one scene in particular — during which Foster fights hand-to-hand with an assassin more than twice his size — nearly did him in.

“It was wild,” he says. “He throws me into a wall. They told him not to and he did it anyway. So I went into the wall and came down — because, you know, I’m of the ‘Jackass’ generation — and snapped my shoulder. I’m right-handed. So you hear something go ‘snap’ and you’re like, ‘Stupid man.’”

And then it was back to work.

“Pain is a great motivator,” Foster insists. “At the end of the day, you can use pain as an energy. You know, it can be emotional, it can be physical. But as the military says, pain is weakness leaving the body, and you’ve just kind of got to ride it out — and hope you’ve got a doctor to pump you full of s—.”