Ben Foster Says He Took Performance Enhancing Drugs To Play Lance Armstrong In ‘The Program’

Ben Foster, who stars as Lance Armstrong in The Program, revealed that he took performance-enhancing drugs to prep for his role, ahead of the film’s TIFF premiere.

Ben Foster Took PEDs To Play Lance Armstrong

The Program, the long-awaited biopic of Lance Armstrong, is still a few days away from its world premiere — Sunday, Sept. 13 — at the Toronto International Film Festival. Before it’s premiere, Foster revealed the lengths to which he went to embody Armstrong on film. As one would expect, Foster’s training included hours of cycling, learning how Armstrong won seven Tour de France titles. However, in training for the role, Foster also took performance-enhancing drugs, something that cost Armstrong his seven Tour de France titles when his doping was exposed in 2012.

“Even discussing it feels tricky because it isn’t something I’d recommend to fellow actors. These are very serious chemicals and they affect your body in real ways. For my investigation it was important for me privately to understand it. And they work,” Foster told The Guardian.

Foster, who is somewhat known for going to extremes for his roles in films like The Messenger and Lone Survivor, added that the drugs affected him long after filming ended, saying, “I’ve only just recovered physically. I’m only now getting my levels back.”

Though Foster doesn’t appear to regret his extreme decision to take drugs to play Armstrong, he did caution actors from doing the same thing, saying, “You have to ask yourself how far you can go and still come back.”

In the end, Foster, who said he knew little about Armstrong when he was cast, appears somewhat sympathetic to the realities of Armstrong’s drug use, noting that it was simply the norm for the top athletes in cycling.

“He started training within a culture that was doping: you’d have to go down 18 riders to find a clean one. He survives death, the story catches fire and he recognizes that. He’s a smart man. He says, ‘I can do some good with this.’ He raised half a billion for cancer research. We just don’t like him because he was Jesus Christ on a bicycle. We’re mad he came back from the dead, saved the sick and then turned out to be full of s—t,” Foster stated.

The Program co-stars Chris O’Dowd as journalist David Walsh and Jesse Plemons and is expected for release by the end of the year — it will first be released in the U.K. and France on Sept. 16.