After more than a decade of pumped-up protagonists on screen, is it time for Hollywood to slim down?.

There was a time, not too long ago, when slim guys could be heroes, too. Mr Keanu Reeves did it in The Matrix. Mr Viggo Mortensen did it in Lord of the Rings. Mr Pierce Brosnan did it repeatedly as James Bond. It was a time of innocence, when a set of washboard abs and a well-defined chest weren’t considered necessary, or even particularly helpful, to the task of saving the world from evil overlords and megalomaniacs. Indeed, the idea that a man burdened with such a grave responsibility would have either the time or the inclination to get his pump on seemed rather strange. Muscles? Those were just things that bodybuilders had, surely?

Well, times have changed. The highest-paid movie star on Earth last year was Mr Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a man who used to be a wrestler and still has the rippling abs to prove it. Not far behind him on the list are: Mr Ben Affleck, who piled on 25 pounds of muscle to play the caped crusader in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; Mr Vin Diesel, who has forged a long and fruitful career out of being huge, most recently in The Fate of the Furious; and Mr Chris Pratt, who went from doughy funnyman in Parks and Recreation to brawny leading man in Guardians of the Galaxy. These actors have brought a level of vein-popping musculature to the screen not seen since the days when Messrs Stallone, Van Damme and Schwarzenegger ruled the box office. Bulging out of their vest tops, cartoonish in their proportions, they’ve pushed the male physical ideal well out of reach.

In modern-day Hollywood, jacked is the new normal. Today’s leading men can expect to spend longer in the gym than they do on set, and to be judged by their bodies as much as by their ability to act. (Or, in the case of Magic Mike XXL, just by their bodies.) And as they age, actors looking to maintain a professional edge have responded by getting bigger and bigger. There’s no better example than Mr Hugh Jackman, whose appearances as Wolverine in the X-Men series have tracked the development of the trend in real-time. In 2000’s X-Men, he sported the lean, athletic frame you’d expect of a man who took care of himself but didn’t spend every waking moment in the gym. By the release of 2013’s The Wolverine, the actor, at this point in his mid-forties, was a gnarled mass of muscle, his hulking, vascular arms the envy of men half his age.

The movement in Hollywood now is for ultra-lean, skintight muscles: abs that look like they’ve been vac-packed; veins where they shouldn’t be; an abdominal V-line or “inguinal crease” – google it – that puts Michelangelo’s “David” to shame. In two of the most extreme examples to date, Mr Jake Gyllenhaal stripped his body of nearly all its fat for 2015’s Southpaw; then, last year, Mr Zac Efron did the same, transforming himself into a human Ken doll for his role as an ex-Olympic swimmer turned bodyguard in 2017’s Baywatch. It was a sight to elicit both admiration and concern. This was the body of a man who consumes enough protein for a family of four; a man who could beat you around an assault course, but who might struggle to survive a harsh winter. He looked, to quote Mr Edward Norton’s narrator from Fight Club, like he’s been carved out of wood.

It was Fight Club, of course, that set the current trend for impossibly low body-fat percentages. As the imaginary Tyler Durden, Mr Brad Pitt essentially played the role of the narrator’s fantasy self: “All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I f**k like you wanna f**k, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.” His physique was the stuff of fantasy, too. Slim yet muscular, and with a startling level of definition – according to reports, he was around six per cent body fat at the time – it inspired a thousand magazine articles and workout plans. Even today, nearly two decades after the movie’s release, personal trainers are still inundated with requests to “make me look like Tyler Durden”.

Fight Club may have laid down the blueprints for the male physical ideal, but it wasn’t until seven years later, in 2006, that they were put into mass production. In the testosterone-fuelled extravaganza of violence and historical inaccuracy that was 300, an oiled and glistening Mr Gerard Butler led an army of impossibly buff Spartans into battle wearing little more than a leather codpiece and cape. The man who whipped the 35-strong cast of actors and stuntmen into shape, ex-alpine climber turned personal trainer Mr Mark Twight, cited Tyler Durden as his main inspiration. Now one of the most in-demand trainers in the industry, his high-intensity, tyre-flipping, kettlebell-swinging bootcamps have since become the stuff of Hollywood legend.

That same year, Mr Daniel Craig brought a thuggish physicality to the role of British intelligence agent James Bond – and a body to match. One of the movie’s most iconic scenes sees him emerging from the sea in a tight pair of La Perla swimming trunks, his hefty shoulders and chest – the result of a gruelling, months-long training regime devised by Royal Marine turned personal trainer Mr Simon Waterson – making his predecessors, ex-bodybuilder Sir Sean Connery included, look positively weedy by comparison.

Over the next decade, as the superhero movie machine went into overdrive, seemingly half of Hollywood got buff. Mr Chris Evans as Captain America, Mr Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Mr Henry Cavill as Superman… the list goes on. As a ripped and fulsome torso became less a desirable quality and more a prerequisite for male actors looking to land a leading role, muscles started to appear in the most unexpected of places: comedies. In 2009’s The Hangover, Mr Bradley Cooper played a teacher who was built like a pro athlete. In 2011’s Friends With Benefits, Mr Justin Timberlake played an art director who, for reasons not addressed, happened to be sporting a gym-honed chest, shoulders and six-pack. It hardly seemed to matter that neither of the roles explicitly demanded a great body. By this point, muscles were just par for the course.

But where does this leave normal guys? Without the time and resources available to a movie star, who can afford to work out in a private gym and employ a team of personal trainers and nutritionists – with the added incentive of having to take his shirt off in front of an audience of millions? How can Joe Average be expected to keep up? A UK study released last month by the Home Office revealed that the proportion of 16 to 24-year-old men using anabolic steroids rose from 0.1 to 0.4 per cent over the past year. That’s around 19,000 more young men resorting to extreme measures in their pursuit of an increasingly unattainable physical ideal.

There are signs that this trend might be coming to an end, though. And we appear to have the small screen to thank for it. As Hollywood studios lean more heavily on big-bucks comic-book franchises – there are nine currently scheduled for 2018, including Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2 and, bizarrely, a sequel to Ant-Man – roles that demand a sense of realism are being pushed onto TV and streaming services. And you simply can’t do realism if your body is unrealistic.

Shows such as This Is Us, in which Mr Milo Ventimiglia plays a thirtysomething father of three in the early 1980s, or Poldark, starring Mr Aidan Turner as a revolutionary soldier in the 18th century – before creatine, HGH supplements and protein shakes were a thing – would be impossible to believe in if the protagonists were as jacked as a pro wrestler. Instead, these actors have cultivated what you might call an optimal Everyman physique: the look of a guy who works out, but didn’t necessarily agree to a strict bulking and cutting regime in order to land the role. More 2000 than 2013 Wolverine, in other words. Indeed, Mr Ventimiglia revealed in an interview that he was actually told by his producers to exercise less.

It’s an encouraging sign, but whether or not it has any effect on the status quo in Hollywood remains to be seen. Will we live to see another slim 007? (It certainly won’t be this decade, as Mr Craig has just signed on for a fifth film.) Will Mr Efron shred those comical abs for a period drama or pile on the pounds for a stab at an Oscar nomination? Today’s actors are still some way off the freakish proportions of Schwarzenegger et al in the late 1980s – remember the uncomfortably long arm wrestle in Predator? – but muscles can’t get much bigger, and body-fat much lower, than it has done already. If the cyclical nature of trends is to be believed, 2017 might be the year we finally reached peak buff.

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