It’s no secret that superhero body standards have gone crazy over the past couple of decades. The relatively modest but healthy-looking physiques of Tobey Maguire in the original Spider-Man and Hugh Jackman in the original X-Men bear little resemblance to the amount of chiselled muscle you see on Marvel superheroes in the 2020s.
With those heightened standards come intense training regimens and highly-tailored diet plans that require a tonne of commitment from actors, and while the results look pretty spectacular it can all come at a major cost.
Actor Benedict Cumberbatch has said it was ‘horrific’ to eat beyond his appetite for Marvel film Doctor Strange, highlighting both the challenge facing actors and the amount of resources that go into making them look like superheroes.
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The London-born film star, 49, known for playing the spell-casting superhero, said he could have fed a family ‘with the amount of eating’ he did, and criticised the film industry for being ‘grossly wasteful’.
Speaking on the podcast Ruthie’s Table 4, he said: “You have someone who can prescribe you what you’re eating and they can cook for you.
“We had a fantastic chef on the last Doctor Strange film … but it’s this amazing facility to go, ‘Right he needs to be on this many calories a day.
“He needs to have five meals, he needs to have a couple of boiled eggs between those five meals or some kind of high protein snack, cheese and crackers or almond butter and crackers. Crackers. Lots of crackers.’
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“For me the exercise is great and the end result is that you feel strong and you feel confident. You hold yourself better, you have stamina through the exercise and the food that makes you last through the gig.
“But it is horrific. I don’t like it personally, I think it’s horrific, eating beyond your appetite… It’s just like, what am I doing? I could feed a family with the amount I’m eating.
“It just slowly, slowly, you have to meet people where they are on these issues in filmmaking. But it’s a grossly wasteful industry.
“So let me think about set builds that aren’t recycled. Think about transport, think about food, think about housing, but also light and energy.
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“The amount of wattage you need to sort of create daylight and consistent light in a studio environment. It’s a lot of energy.
“So the first people to stick their head above the parapet to talk about anything to do with climate and excessive use of things, or hypocrisy, or systems that don’t work, get slammed if they’re actors, because they’re ferried about.”
He added: “It is a systemic thing. But as a producer, I’m really hot on that.
“I try to push the green initiative, the green handshake into every agreement I can.”
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Cumberbatch is also known for playing Sherlock Holmes in the eponymous award-winning BBC series and won a Bafta TV award for the drama Patrick Melrose, which was based on a series of semi-autobiographical novels by Edward St Aubyn.
Ruthie’s Table 4 invites a range of notable guests to take a seat at the River Cafe with co-founder Ruth Rogers.
This season features conversations with people including Sir Elton John, Bono, Guillermo Del Toro, Dame Kristin Scott Thomas, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, and Sir Ian McKellen.
Rachael Davis