Sylvester Stallone finally said the quiet part loud about superhero bodies. Now, the Academy must recognize endocrinologists for the artists they truly are.
I was seated just three rows back at the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday night—comped tickets, naturally, courtesy of a publicist who still owes me for burying that Sundance catastrophe—when Sylvester Stallone finally shattered the grandest illusion in modern cinema. Discussing his new memoir, the Oscar-winner declared to journalist Tracy Smith that taking steroids to bulk up for a role is simply "putting on part of a costume."
I audibly gasped, spilling a nominal amount of sparkling water onto my lap. Not out of shock, but out of pure, unadulterated relief. Finally, an elder statesman of the industry had the gravitas to say what the cowards in the trades have been terrified to admit.
For the last fifteen years, we have forced our leading men to sit on press tour couches and peddle the humiliating lie that they achieved the physique of a shaved silverback gorilla entirely through boiled chicken, broccoli, and "respecting the process." We have forced them to hide the brushstrokes of their masterpieces.
Why do we insist on this double standard? If a wardrobe department spends six months hand-stitching a historically accurate wool tunic for a period drama, we hand them a golden statue and a retrospective at the Met. But when a 45-year-old actor works with a team of underground chemists to artificially elevate his testosterone to levels unseen since the Pleistocene epoch, we call it a "scandal."
We laud Method actors for the psychological toll they endure. We applaud Christian Bale for losing weight, and we praise Jeremy Strong for refusing to break character at the craft services table. But what could possibly demonstrate a deeper commitment to the text than fundamentally altering your own internal organs? A hat can be taken off at the end of the day. A chemically enlarged pituitary gland is a round-the-clock commitment to the director's vision.
When you look at the vascularity of a modern leading man, you are looking at bespoke tailoring at a cellular level.
Think of the sheer variety of biochemical costuming available to today's filmmakers. The bloated, watery mass of a 1980s action star was the equivalent of a cheap Halloween mask purchased at a drugstore. Today’s superhero physiques—the paper-thin skin, the pulsing veins that look like a roadmap of the interstate highway system, the deltoids that sit six inches higher than nature intended—are haute couture.
It takes a village of medical professionals, ironclad non-disclosure agreements, and offshore pharmacies to construct a body that looks like it was drawn by a thirteen-year-old boy in 1993. Over a rather tense cobb salad at the Polo Lounge last week, a senior casting director confessed to me that the real stars of the modern box office aren't the actors at all. They are the artisanal pharmacists who sculpt them. They are the Edith Heads of our generation, substituting synthetic steroids for taffeta.
If the Academy had any courage, they would immediately split the Best Costume Design category into two distinct awards: ‘Best Use of Textiles’ and ‘Best Use of Synthetic Hormones.’ We hand out statues for stitching corsets, yet we completely ignore the grueling, highly illegal artistry required to construct a pair of shoulders that look like two honey-baked hams shoved into a spandex rash guard.
Make no mistake, we are looking at these bodies as human forms, rather than what they truly are: incredibly expensive, highly volatile meat-suits worn temporarily by men who just want to franchise a comic book IP.
The next time a man with a 54-inch chest and a resting heart rate of 110 beats per minute steps onto a premiere red carpet, do not ask him about his workout routine. Ask him who he is wearing.