Long before audiences knew him as Kingpin in Marvel’s Daredevil or Detective Robert Goren in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Vincent D’Onofrio was a young actor trying to make a name for himself. Born in Brooklyn in 1959, he spent his early years studying acting while working various jobs to support himself. His major breakthrough came when actor Matthew Modine encouraged him to audition for Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War drama Full Metal Jacket.

Getting the role was only the beginning. D’Onofrio was cast as Private Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence, a Marine recruit whose psychological condition deteriorates under brutal military training. To physically transform himself for the part, he gained roughly 70–80 pounds, shaved his head and endured demanding filming conditions. The dramatic change was so convincing that people sometimes failed to recognize him outside the film, while the physical demands of production also contributed to a knee injury.

After Full Metal Jacket, D’Onofrio continued building an unusually diverse career. He appeared in films including Mystic Pizza and Men in Black before becoming widely known on television as Detective Goren. Decades later, he found another major audience as Wilson Fisk, better known as Kingpin, in Marvel’s Daredevil. His return as Fisk in Daredevil: Born Again has shown just how long-lasting his career has been.

But the most remarkable part of his story is what happened during Full Metal Jacket. D’Onofrio’s enormous physical transformation not only helped create one of the film’s most unforgettable characters, but also changed the way strangers treated him. He later described experiencing people making assumptions about him based purely on his appearance. After filming, he lost the weight and moved on to completely different roles—but the performance had already established him as an actor capable of disappearing entirely into a character. What began as one extreme transformation ultimately became the foundation of a career spanning more than four decades.