There’s no canonical reason for most superheroes to be brolic. Maybe it makes sense for, say, Peacemaker to be built like John Cena: Cena’s character, Chris Smith, isn’t superhuman, so he has to lift heavy. If a hero possesses superstrength, though, it generally doesn’t derive from their musculature. It comes from some special property that enables them to be exponentially more mighty than a non-superpowered person with a comparable physique. Thus, they could look normal, or as normal as one can while wearing a cape. Jedi aren’t jacked, and they’re functionally superheroes. They just have superpowered cells that enable them to tap into an energy field that suffuses the galaxy far, far away. That’s not so different from a Kryptonian called Kal-El going Super Saiyan through exposure to Earth’s yellow sun. In essence, Superman is a luminous being, not this crude matter.
But if superheroes’ size matters not, one wouldn’t know it from comics or movies. Both in print and on-screen, superheroes (and action heroes in general) have gradually gotten larger and leaner, mirroring real-life bodybuilders, who morphed from Charles Atlas and Steve Reeves into the “mass monsters” of the 1990s as increasingly potent chemical cocktails enhanced hypertrophy. Even if Superman’s muscles aren’t really responsible for his strength, there’s still some logic to making them massive. On-screen, muscle connotes strength: It’s the superficial signifier of a mystical transformation or mutation. And because humans keep pushing the limits of muscular development, superheroes have to bulk and cut, too. Marvel and DC can’t have the strongest conceivable beings getting mogged by the average fitfluencer, so superheroes must be supersized.
Hence the physique inflation of Superman from George Reeves to Henry Cavill, or of Batman from Adam West to Christian Bale, or of Wolverine from the Hugh Jackman of X-Men to the Hugh Even-More-Jacked-Man of subsequent films. The physical commitment depends on the part: Pedro Pascal didn’t have to get huge to play Reed Richards, a hero who’s more famous for his brain (and his elasticity) than his brawn, but David Corenswet pumped plenty of iron to become the Man of Steel. Generally, the stronger the superhero, the more muscular the actor. And if a film depicts a superpowered protagonist’s origin story, then the actor has to be big enough to pull off a breathtaking “before and after,” à la the transformation of steroid-fueled—sorry, super soldier serum–fueled—Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger. Even superheroes on the slight side, such as Spider-Man, get the chance to lose their shirts and show off.
Regaling rapt readers and listeners with the story of a star’s off-screen journey to get those gains is a staple of the superhero press tour. After decades of nonstop superhero cinema, nobody bats an eye when actors who insist that they’re natural (and naturally skinny) pack improbable amounts of muscle onto their already fit frames—ostensibly by consuming many thousands of clean calories, coupled with well-tailored training routines and ample beauty sleep. The claims that these stars are achieving superhuman results without assistance from superhuman substances simply strain belief. But the clearest indication of the fixation on superhero physiques isn’t the ever-more massive and shredded appearance of heroes for whom strength is central, such as Superman, Cap, or Thor. It’s the ubiquity of superheroes—or supporting players in superhero stories—who are swole for no reason.
Let’s stick with Superman and consider Lex Luthor. Can you imagine Gene Hackman’s Luthor in the gym? Nah—he might engineer a ripped adversary for Superman, but he’d hardly hit the weights himself. Yet Nicholas Hoult, inspired by the swole Luthor of Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, worked out intensely to play Superman’s nemesis in this summer’s reboot, even though he wasn’t expecting to shed his shirt on-screen. No one would have complained if Luthor had looked a little smaller, but skinny or soft physiques are out of fashion in superhero films, even for rich, ingenious supervillains.
This trend extends to TV, too. Sacha Baron Cohen, who made his debut as Mephisto in Ironheart, recently landed the latest cover of Men’s Fitness U.K. as he unveiled his oiled-up abs and vascular arms. The actor and comedian’s recent divorce spurred online chatter that his motives for revamping his body were more about being back on the romantic market than about earning Marvel money—Baron Cohen even joked that he was “hard launching [his] mid-life crisis”—but looking the part of the red-clad demon was his stated goal. Granted, Baron Cohen isn’t hulking; he’s lean and toned, like the well-defined Mephisto who has long appeared on the page. But neither the character nor the comedian was associated with a rippling bod before Baron Cohen’s thirst traps.
This obsession with superfluously swole superheroes or anabolic-looking ancillary characters is literally a weird flex. And the cycle (so to speak) keeps repeating itself. Mild-mannered funnyman Kumail Nanjiani chiseled a Chad-shaped jawline, bulging biceps, and a carved torso for Eternals that he has maintained. Will Poulter got impressively sculpted—so I read, although he might as well have been wearing a muscle suit—to play Adam Warlock in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Josh Brolin got yoked to play Cable in Deadpool 2. Even handsome but non-macho leading men Chris Pratt and Paul Rudd, who played slightly unsavory (or borderline schlubby) Marvel heroes Peter Quill and Scott Lang, respectively, signed up for months of sweating to hone their midsections for shocking close-ups. “I felt silly,” Rudd said of the ensuing images. Print magazines have had a hard decade or two, but imagine how bad things would’ve been if not for the constant stream of “superhero workouts” to chronicle.
This phenomenon is so pervasive that it occasionally leads to false alarms. In 2016, J.K. Simmons went viral for eye-popping (albeit slightly misleading) workout photos that many sources assumed were part of his prep for the part of Commissioner Gordon in 2017’s Justice League. It would’ve been somewhat silly for Simmons to get peeled just to play a police commissioner who always wears a trench coat, but when it comes to the conditioning of actors in superhero movies, diced is the default. Years later, however, Simmons revealed that he wasn’t getting jacked for Justice League. “It was just coincidental timing with me trying to reclaim my distant athletic youth and trying to stay fit and give my wife some eye candy,” he said.
Everyone is entitled to a fitness kick (although superhero-actor regimens are extreme, and few civilians can expect the same results as quickly). And some superhero actors have exceeded the studio’s desires: Marvel told Nanjiani that he didn’t have to work out that much to play Kingo and feared that he’d gotten too buff, but Nanjiani felt obligated to be bigger because, he said, “If I’m playing the first South Asian superhero, I want to look like someone who can take on Thor or Captain America.”
Nanjiani was effectively following the lead of Robert Downey Jr., who became more of a pumping Iron Man than Marvel wanted, paving the way for the man mountains that the MCU’s Chrises became. If actors feel like looking juicy (whether they’re natty or not), so be it. Generally speaking, though, the studios desire a certain aesthetic, which puts pressure on actors to conform. The casts of superhero stories shouldn’t have to go this hard. An oversized superhero character can be just as distracting and capable of breaking your suspension of disbelief as an “undersized” one.
How and when will this trend end? Perhaps some prominent person in the industry will break the omertà surrounding presumed PED use. Maybe that would cause a scandal and some subsequent movement toward transparency and reform, as it did in the Olympics, baseball, and (to some extent) professional wrestling. Or maybe that substance use is so obvious—and so normalized outside Hollywood—that no one would care. (Although if that’s the case, the current culture of secrecy seems silly.)
Alternatively, maybe some star or some studio will become a crusader for less extraordinary superhero standards and put pressure on the industry to downsize. In 2020, Robert Pattinson said that he wasn’t working out to play Batman, telling GQ, “I think if you’re working out all the time, you’re part of the problem. You set a precedent. No one was doing this in the ’70s. Even James Dean—he wasn’t exactly ripped.” Later, after some blowback from a vocal subset of fans, Pattinson said that he’d been kidding and, predictably, got pretty ripped (albeit not Bale buff). But the pendulum could be about to swing back toward smaller suits. There has been a bit more body diversity in both bodybuilding and superhero comics and animation lately, which may eventually translate to live-action films and TV. Tastes change, and moviemakers could come to accept that not every superhero (or character in the general proximity of a superhero) has to be jacked.
Or—speaking of changing tastes—maybe superheroes will shrink along with the market’s demand for them: The actors might not be as big if the pictures get small. Superhero movies may not remain popular or lucrative enough for actors to set their sweet teeth aside, set up shop in the gym, and overhaul their physiques over many months just for a credit in the next would-be blockbuster. The initial reception to The Fantastic Four: First Steps was warm, which seemed to suggest both that the third time was the charm for the famous superhero squad and that the genre had rebounded. But the second step was a doozy: Those box-office figures fell off sharply in the film’s second weekend, rekindling concerns that costumed, superpowered protagonists are well past their prime. Superhero films may be faltering. For now, though, the actors are still going (unrealistically) strong.
