34 min
Numlock Sunday: Alex Abad-Santos on how superhero actors really get into gear The Numlock Podcast
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- News
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to the brilliant Alex Abad-Santos who wrote “The Open Secret of Looking Like A Superhero” for Vox. Here's what I wrote about it:
Actors are increasingly turning to anabolic steroids in order to attain the figures necessary for movies today. While it’s not legal in the United States to use steroids or performance-enhancing drugs without a prescription, in the movie business it’s not considered cheating the same way it is in sports and obviously isn’t tested for. It’s part of a larger trend, too: testosterone prescribed to American men tripled from 2001 to 2011, and while it decreased from 2013 to 2016 following renewed warnings from the FDA about risks, it’s impossible to study the underground market and HGH is one of the most common drugs to go missing between manufacture and shipping. The long-term health effects of steroids are still little understood, but they’re not looking good: One recent long-term study of steroid-using weightlifters found that of 86 steroid users, three had a heart attack before 45, compared to none of the 54 comparison lifters.
Alex is one of my favorite culture writers, and he wrote a really incisive story about the impacts that PED use in Hollywood and social media has on viewers. His story peels back the façade set up by the industry and speaks the truth all about how pervasive steroids and hormone usage is in the entertainment business
We also talked about the pressures pushing actors towards this, from the demise of the mid-budget movie to the dominance of comic book movies, which bring hyper-masculine superheros from the page to the screen. Also, we talked about his favorite topic, the X-Men.
Alex can be found at Vox, on Twitter and on Instagram.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Alex, thank you so much for coming on.Oh my God. Thank you for having me. And oh my gosh, this is the first time that we're seeing each other IRL.I know. It's weird. Again, I've been a fan of your work for a really long time, so it's great to finally get a chance to hang out.Yeah. I am a fan of yours too. I remember when you were at, was it FiveThirtyEight?That's the number, yeah.FiveThirtyEight. I'm always really bad with the number, with remembering which one it is, but I remember being like, "Oh my gosh, this makes my job so much easier when I can link a study on something about comic books." Yeah, it's just very weird that we only are hanging out now.Yeah. I'm going to chalk it up to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but—Yes. Blame the pandemic, please.We'll do that. You wrote a really, really fascinating story that talked about a topic that I think everybody kind of alludes to, but I hadn't really seen actual reporting behind and hard data behind. You talked about steroids, and HGH, and testosterone use among movie stars. What got you interested in the story?I think one of the first things that got me interested was, I was looking on my Instagram explore page and I was showing my friend at dinner and I was like, "Why am I having chicken nuggets? This guy looks like this." He was huge, his muscles were crazy, his abs were nuts. And then after that, my friend was just like, "Yo, he's on steroids."And I was like, "Oh." And they were just like, "You know, how everyone in Hollywood is."I'm like, "Oh, is everyone in Hollywood?"And he was just basically like, "Yes." I don't want to get sued, but there's a lot of people out there, if you're in an action movie or if you're with your shirt off, that might not be getting those results naturally. Just no matter how much you're at the weight room, no matter what you're eating, you're never going to look like that. And that was it. I was like, "Maybe I should write a story about this."I liked the story a lot, because particularly there was a part where you talked about, there may have been a time in history where you may have aspired to have the body of the movie stars, b
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to the brilliant Alex Abad-Santos who wrote “The Open Secret of Looking Like A Superhero” for Vox. Here's what I wrote about it:
Actors are increasingly turning to anabolic steroids in order to attain the figures necessary for movies today. While it’s not legal in the United States to use steroids or performance-enhancing drugs without a prescription, in the movie business it’s not considered cheating the same way it is in sports and obviously isn’t tested for. It’s part of a larger trend, too: testosterone prescribed to American men tripled from 2001 to 2011, and while it decreased from 2013 to 2016 following renewed warnings from the FDA about risks, it’s impossible to study the underground market and HGH is one of the most common drugs to go missing between manufacture and shipping. The long-term health effects of steroids are still little understood, but they’re not looking good: One recent long-term study of steroid-using weightlifters found that of 86 steroid users, three had a heart attack before 45, compared to none of the 54 comparison lifters.
Alex is one of my favorite culture writers, and he wrote a really incisive story about the impacts that PED use in Hollywood and social media has on viewers. His story peels back the façade set up by the industry and speaks the truth all about how pervasive steroids and hormone usage is in the entertainment business
We also talked about the pressures pushing actors towards this, from the demise of the mid-budget movie to the dominance of comic book movies, which bring hyper-masculine superheros from the page to the screen. Also, we talked about his favorite topic, the X-Men.
Alex can be found at Vox, on Twitter and on Instagram.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Alex, thank you so much for coming on.Oh my God. Thank you for having me. And oh my gosh, this is the first time that we're seeing each other IRL.I know. It's weird. Again, I've been a fan of your work for a really long time, so it's great to finally get a chance to hang out.Yeah. I am a fan of yours too. I remember when you were at, was it FiveThirtyEight?That's the number, yeah.FiveThirtyEight. I'm always really bad with the number, with remembering which one it is, but I remember being like, "Oh my gosh, this makes my job so much easier when I can link a study on something about comic books." Yeah, it's just very weird that we only are hanging out now.Yeah. I'm going to chalk it up to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but—Yes. Blame the pandemic, please.We'll do that. You wrote a really, really fascinating story that talked about a topic that I think everybody kind of alludes to, but I hadn't really seen actual reporting behind and hard data behind. You talked about steroids, and HGH, and testosterone use among movie stars. What got you interested in the story?I think one of the first things that got me interested was, I was looking on my Instagram explore page and I was showing my friend at dinner and I was like, "Why am I having chicken nuggets? This guy looks like this." He was huge, his muscles were crazy, his abs were nuts. And then after that, my friend was just like, "Yo, he's on steroids."And I was like, "Oh." And they were just like, "You know, how everyone in Hollywood is."I'm like, "Oh, is everyone in Hollywood?"And he was just basically like, "Yes." I don't want to get sued, but there's a lot of people out there, if you're in an action movie or if you're with your shirt off, that might not be getting those results naturally. Just no matter how much you're at the weight room, no matter what you're eating, you're never going to look like that. And that was it. I was like, "Maybe I should write a story about this."I liked the story a lot, because particularly there was a part where you talked about, there may have been a time in history where you may have aspired to have the body of the movie stars, b
34 min