How Bodybuilders (and Steroids) Reshaped Hollywood
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The post How Bodybuilders (and Steroids) Reshaped Hollywood appeared first on Consequence.
The full interview with Dr. Mike Israetel about bodybuilding, buff actors, and steroids in Hollywood is also available as an episode of the Consequence UNCUT podcast. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.
It happens a few times a year: a famous actor, perhaps in his forties or fifties, posts a photo looking buff. Some of the comments are admiring and more than a few are thirsty, but invariably, suspicions are raised. Did he accomplish this transformation naturally? Or did he have — you know — help?
“Trenything is possible,” is a common comment-section refrain; a reference to trenbolone, a powerful anabolic steroid. The implication is clear: With enough chemicals, anyone can get ripped. But is that true — is “trenything” possible? What kind of growth do steroids allow, and how popular are they among the A-list actors of today?
A handful of superstars have publicly admitted to using the kinds of compounds you can’t buy at a mall — some more willingly than others. In 2007, Sylvester Stallone pleaded guilty to importing growth hormone into Australia after being caught at customs.
Meanwhile, Arnold Schwarzenegger has openly chatted about his enhanced training techniques, especially during his bodybuilding peak (“100 milligrams a week,” plus “three Dianabol a day, so that was 15 milligrams”). For his part, Mickey Rourke gave a winking admission to Men’s Journal when asked about steroids for his Oscar-nominated role in The Wrestler: “When I’m a wrestler, I behave like a wrestler,” he said.
Stallone and Schwarzenegger were part of the first wave of bodybuilders to reshape Hollywood. Before the 1970s, even the most swaggering cinema stud wasn’t physically intimidating.
“Male stars who appeared in action-oriented genres (Westerns, adventures, crime dramas) during the Golden Age of Hollywood were charismatic but did not work out or have uber-masculine bodies,” Dr. Susan Doll, film studies professor at Ringling College of Art & Design, tells Consequence. “Think [Humphrey] Bogart or [James] Cagney or John Wayne, whose screen presence was based on their star images and charisma. There are a couple of exceptions — Victor Mature was a physical fitness enthusiast, as was Kirk Douglas.”
But over time, those exceptions became less rare. In the economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s, the popularity of weightlifting exploded in the United States. “As more people became wealthy, more people entered the fitness space,” Dr. Mike Israetel, a competitive bodybuilder, professor of exercise science at Lehman College, and creator of the Renaissance Periodization YouTube channel, explains. “And when you have more people entering and spending longer time doing it, and access to more information, people just get more jacked.”
Commercial chemistry also developed. “Around the 1960s, a lot of large pharmaceutical companies started to mass manufacture anabolic steroids,” he says. “Slowly over the course of the ’60s, more and more folks at the professional bodybuilder ranks started to experiment with them and take them. And that made a huge difference by itself.”
Exercise science redefined what humans could look like. Bodybuilding’s popularity exploded, fixing ever-larger muscles in the popular imagination. And as bodybuilders and their sport grew bigger, Hollywood followed those cues.
In 1976, Rocky became an unexpected smash in part because of Sylvester Stallone’s bruising physicality. 1978’s The Incredible Hulk TV series utilized famed bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno as a convincingly superhuman monstrosity. And in blockbusters of the 1980s, Mr. Universe himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, became much larger than the sport he helped popularize.
“The success of Stallone and Schwarzenegger made possible action stars such as Dolph Lundgren, Carl Weathers, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, but also created the action hero archetype,” Dr. Doll says. “Action stars such as Bruce Willis, Kurt Russell, and Mel Gibson, who were not bodybuilders or martial artists, kept in shape because baring their bodies was part of the genre.”
The body itself became central to the storytelling. “The bodies are idealized through low angles, flexed muscles, slow motion, etc., but then brutalized through stunts, torture, and wounds,” Dr. Doll explains. “In First Blood, Rambo sews up his own wound, which becomes a trope of the genre. In Rambo: First Blood, Part II, [Stallone] pulls a piece of wood out of a wound, fills it with gunpowder, then ignites it! The only thing more fetishized than the weapons in these movies are the protagonists’ bodies.”
Bodybuilding techniques — at times, including drugs — helped sell that storytelling to audiences around the world. Today, steroids remain seemingly common in competitive bodybuilding and professional wrestling. But is there reason to think they’re rampant on film sets? Are they, as some social media commenters have alleged, being used by pretty much everyone in Hollywood? Probably not.
First, for women, the side effects of steroid use can include masculinizing features — something many actresses are keen to avoid. And everyone can suffer from red, broken skin, not to mention damage to the heart, liver, and kidneys. Even granted that more men might be inclined if offered the right part, “Most actors simply don’t play physical roles,” Dr. Israetel explains.
Ok, what about the few, the proud, the shirtless studs? Speculating about which men are juicing and which are natty is a popular internet pastime, but the difference might be difficult to suss out, even to the trained eye. That’s because between steroids and genetics, “genetics wins every single time,” according to Dr. Israetel. “Genetics establishes your general shape. If someone has a not-so-great shape, they can become quite more muscular, leaner, and, ah man! They just don’t look like Chris Hemsworth or Chris Evans.”
Those capacities extend to muscle-enhancers. “If you have really good genetics, you even respond to drugs better. If you have not-so-great genetics for drug response, or for lifting response, you can take a lot of drugs, and not a whole lot happens to you.”
Dr. Israetel has both personal and professional experience with anabolic steroids. Among the buff actors, he’d be most surprised if some of the ex-wrestlers were natural. “If you look at The Rock, most people who have been around bodybuilding for a long time will be like, ‘I know that look,'” he says. “That’s not a drug free look. It doesn’t look terrible — it looks great! But there’s a bit of a difference there that you can spot.”
He has heard internet rumors about certain superhero physiques, and he remains unconvinced. “There’s no reason to assume transformations that are not very impressive are involving steroids,” he says. “Most people think Hollywood is all incredible transformations. A lot of times the actors get into fine shape — nothing you would ring home about. The gentleman Hugh Jackman, who played Wolverine, nothing about his physique says steroids to me.
“Different for The Rock,” he adds. While the 6’5″ Dwayne Johnson has a height advantage over the 6’3″ Jackman, you can literally see his point: “The Rock weighs maybe 80 pounds more than Hugh Jackman. So, there’s something to explain there.”
Of course, Jackman could be taking modest testosterone supplements or blasting trenbolone and we might not know. The same logic can be applied for other high-profile transformations, eye-catching but hardly impossible, like Jake “Jacked” Gyllenhaal’s fighting body in the upcoming remake of Road House. Perhaps Jackman or Gyllenhaal did use drugs. But they’re not enormous, and since they already had impeccable genetics, expensive coaches, and plenty of free time to train, would they even need to?
In the end it may not matter, for two reasons. According to Dr. Israetel, the whole preoccupation with “natural” bodies reveals a deeper hypocrisy. “There’s a double-standard moralizing by many people who want to see the biggest physiques and the most ripped and juicy people, but they somehow have not thought through the whole process,” he says.
And then, as Dr. Doll laments, this kind of storytelling of the body is down from its pre-millennium peak, even as superheroes have taken over. For all the action heroics of Marvel movies, so often “the superhuman physique is just an illusion in the Marvel Universe,” she says. “While the marketing for the Marvel films often stresses the endless training the actors do, you don’t really see it when it is hidden by plastic costumes (Iron Man), CGI (the Hulk, among others), or form-fitting catsuits (Black Widow). Their martial arts or fighting skills are minimal.”
Even today’s ripped stars seem to be moving away from the world of superheroes. Chris Evans hung up Captain America’s shield. Henry Cavill and the Superman franchise parted ways. Chris Hemsworth, whose Thor was perhaps the most convincing non-CGI superhero since Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk, wants to “do some other stuff for a while,” and has been acting less since learning of a predisposition for Alzheimer’s.
Action movies, like the film industry, are in a period of transition. But buff bodies have hardly gone out of style, and the same old questions will rage on. Most actors are not using steroids, a small number definitely do, and among both groups it’s easy to enjoy these stacked physiques for what they are: The culmination of hundreds of years of exercise science pushed to incredible limits. Combining athletics, art, and science, we can ask, what are humans capable of? They can become a Superman that looks actually super. They can make us believe that gods have descended to earth, even before the director yells, “Action!”
How Bodybuilders (and Steroids) Reshaped Hollywood
Wren Graves
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