When we go to the cinema, we expect to see things we’ve never seen and a portrayal of experiences we may never face. We see our favourite actors and actresses performing roles that define or destroy their careers, but what we rarely glimpse is the personal side of acting.

Ryan Reynolds’s experiences on his latest film ‘Buried’ illustrate this point. In this white-knuckle thriller, Reynolds portrays an American truck driver who gets abducted in Iraq and awakens to find himself buried six feet under.

Filming for the movie was gruelling and Reynolds suffered a bald patch amongst other physical injuries that he described as being “like souvenirs”, insomnia and jitters as a result of the “heightened state of anxiety and panic”.

Reynolds booked a beach holiday to help him unwind after filming was completed, but after six hours on the beach, Reynolds packed his bags and headed home. “That didn’t work out so well,” Reynolds said of his holiday, “because what I didn’t think of in advance would be that I would be lying on sand yet again.”