FIRST OFF . . .

Vincent D’Onofrio, our Before and After Story today, put on 70 pounds for director Stanley Kubrick to play the sad-sack, chubby Marine recruit “Gomer Pyle” in “Full Metal Jacket” (left). “After Stanley and I had talked about it with a physical therapist, Warner Bros. (the film’s distributor) paid for the meals by giving me a huge per diem,” D’Onofrio said Monday. The add-on diet? “Three big meals a day, but no junk; a lot of meat and carbohydrates,” the actor said. “It took me three months to gain 50 pounds--and then we decided I should add another 20.” Getting back to his normal weight, 210 pounds, was harder, of course. “I worked with a soccer trainer for six months,” D’Onofrio, 27, and 6 feet 3 inches tall, sighed. “1,500 calories a day, heavy calisthenics, jogging, aerobics . . . a whole lot of work. Now I know how Bobby De Niro (who put on some heavy avoirdupois for two roles, boxer Jake La Motta and gangster Al Capone) felt--but he didn’t have to keep it on as long as I did.” While D’Onofrio was trimming down from “Jacket,” he did a turn as a mechanic (and as a Norse deity) in “Adventures in Babysitting” (above right)--which is “a little closer to what I really look like,” the actor added. But which character? The god or the mechanic?