January 7, 2015
Jake Gyllenhaal in Southpaw.
At the end of November, pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal in his upcoming 2015 film Southpaw went viral because he was unrecognizable, thanks to a newly ripped boxer’s physique. It’s a time-honored tradition in Hollywood for actors and actresses to dramatically change their bodies to fully inhabit the characters they play, but it’s not easy and it usually requires a savvy team to make it happen. We tracked down a few of the pros responsible for sculpting some of Hollywood’s hottest bodies to find out exactly what it takes.
Think of any superhero movie that’s been released in the last 10 years and there’s a good chance Bobby Strom and his wife Alicia had a hand in transforming the leads into ass-kicking, six-pack-sporting machines. The duo trained Scarlett Johansson for Iron Man 2, Jessica Biel for Blade Trinity, andBlake Lively and Ryan Reynolds for Green Lantern, to name just a few. While it generally takes months of work and commitment, every situation is different. “With Scarlett, she dropped a few pounds of fat and added a few pounds of lean muscle. On somebody her size, it’s very obvious,” Strom explains. “Ryan Reynolds is six-three and very long limbed, so you need to add a lot to see a visual change.”
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Renee Zellweger put on 20 pounds to play Bridget Jones inBridget Jones’s Diary.
Basically, a thirty-minute jaunt on the elliptical a few times a week isn’t going to cut it if you’re trying to bulk up or get lean. Deadline reports that Gyllenhaal trained twice a day every day with real boxing coaches for several months. Strom has his clients work out five to six days a week doing various combinations of resistance training with equipment and their own body weight, cardio drills like sprinting and rowing, and core and balance training, without any breaks in between exercises. (Core training is especially important if an actor is doing his or her own stunts—it might look sexy on camera, but it also helps prevent injuries.)
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For 2014’s Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike had to gain and lose weight four times while shooting according to her trainer, Holly Lawson, who’s also a professional boxer. Lawson spent every day for about six months with Pike before and during shooting. “We had two and a half weeks to put weight on her, she went to film in Missouri, and then she came back and we had 10 days to take all that weight off her,” Lawson says. To accomplish this, Lawson had Pike put on almost eight pounds of muscle with heavy lifting and a very specific eating plan (more on that in a minute).
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