It’s been called the worst-kept secret in Hollywood. How do actors who play superheroes and action hunks get in Zeus-grade shape? How do they get ripped in the space of a few months, and maintain their vascular, zero body-fat physiques over a 90-day shoot? How do they do this well into middle age – fitting in high-intensity workouts twice a day – when the majority of their peers are doing burpees not for cardio but to help their baby grandchildren digest their dinners?

According to the personal trainers hired to whip A-listers into shape, the answer is performance enhancing drugs, or PEDs. Actors of a certain age whose roles depend on being hench are said to keep little vials of PEDs in the fridge, which they will inject into their bellies and thighs to give them an edge in the gym and maintain a toned look of rippling muscles.

Fitness industry professionals who have spoken to the 

 say a surprising number of Hollywood actors, whose faces and abs will be familiar to you from their heroic roles in ancient battles and intergalactic showdowns, are secretly juicing. The audience might think the actor’s transformation involved a cutting-edge workout plan, long hours in the gym, and the consumption of a zoo’s worth of protein, but these experts say that’s only part of the truth. Call it the magic of cinema — it’s just an illusion.

Actor Rob McElhenny hinted that he may have had a little leg up in an interview with Men&#8217;s Health in 2021


There was a fad a few years ago when celebrities shared their daily routines, revealing inhumane schedules of 3am workouts and cryo chamber recovery sessions. Grimes, the singer, parodied these extreme regimens by claiming that every day she practiced a batty mix of screaming therapy, sword fighting, and sensory deprivation.

As part of the trend Rob McElhenney told his Instagram followers how he got jacked for his role as Mac in 

. “Look, it’s not that hard,” he wrote. “All you need to do is lift weights six days a week, stop drinking alcohol, don’t eat anything after 7pm, don’t eat any carbs or sugar at all, in fact just don’t eat anything you like, get the personal trainer from 

, sleep nine hours a night, run three miles a day, and have a studio pay for the whole thing over a six to seven month span.”

He said he didn’t know “why everyone’s not doing this”, adding: “It’s a super realistic lifestyle and an appropriate body image to compare oneself to.”

That was in 2018, but it took until 2021 before McElhenney seemed to hint that his incredible metamorphosis involved some bonus oomph. In a video interview with 

 last year, he said during his training period he visited a physician “two to three times a week to monitor [his] testosterone levels”. McElhenney then jokingly batted away a question that he had taken steroids to get the body of Hercules. “I’m not going to get into the medical science of it,” he said with a deadpan face. He quipped that because he is an “alpha dog monster”, he had “elevated levels of testosterone naturally”. Bodybuilders taking testosterone injections to increase muscle mass need regular visits to a doctor to check their hormones stay within safe limits.

Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted to taking steroids in his bodybuilding heyday


What made McElhenney’s almost-confession (if you could call it that) so refreshing is that it confronted a curious reticence in Hollywood to admit what seems obvious to fitness professionals. Obviously not every actor who gets shredded uses PEDs, but like in sport, it is much more common than fans might think.

Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted taking steroids — in his wonderful accent it sounds like he calls them 

 — during his competitive bodybuilding days in the 1970s. Charlie Sheen used PEDs — surely the least concerning substance he is known to have ingested — to improve his pitching arm for the 1980s baseball movie, 

. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson confessed to dabbling with steroids as a teenager. Mickey Rourke, Oliver Stone, and Nick Nolte have copped to taking hormones as well. And back in 2007, Sylvester Stallone was searched by Australian customs on the way to shoot a 

 film and found with vials of testosterone and human growth hormone, another substance that increases muscle mass and speeds up post-workout repair.

"The weights haven't gotten any heavier..."

 say only the gullible believe that actors don’t juice.

, a world champion powerlifter who supervised drug testing at the Rio Olympics, tells me to be wary of celebrities who claim their body transformations are entirely down to clever workout plans and savvy training routines.

“The weights haven’t gotten any heavier,” he says. “The protein hasn’t gotten any better. Some guy who went to drama school or was a waiter and got discovered because he was handsome shouldn’t look as good as someone who has put his career into being an Olympic boxer.”

Herbst says the super-low body fat look is extremely difficult to maintain for long periods of time before keeling over. “You can look muscular and vascular without performance enhancers – it takes an incredible amount of discipline,” he says. “You can’t keep a body fat percentage like that naturally. You can keep it for a day or a week, then the system starts to break down. Some of these movie shoots go for six months. You can’t look that good for that amount of time without help.”

Charlie Sheen took PEDs to strengthen his pitching arm while filming baseball epic Major League


, in an article on this very issue in 2013, spoke to a personal trainer who cut ties with their 30-something male client because he was juicing for a lead role that “required ample spotlight on his abs”. Performance enhancers are so prevalent among the wannabe tough guys of Tinseltown, the magazine said, that it was known as the “no-duh cousin” of Botox and Restylane, otherwise known as subdermal facial fillers.

In researching this article, I contacted dozens of celebrity trainers who work with A-list clients to ask about the prevalence of PEDs. A lot of my messages fell on deaf ears. One response that stood out came from Mark Twight, who coached Jason Momoa for his lead role in 

 movies. Twight read my email asking if he would be keen to chat about PEDs in Hollywood and replied: “This is not at all interesting to me.”

, an elite trainer who has coached some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and has 30 years of experience in the fitness world. Her candour was eye-opening. “It’s widely known and understood by those of us on this side of the table that athletes and celebrities would not be able to achieve the things that they do without performance enhancement,” she tells me. “Is it happening? Yes, absolutely. The world would be naive to think that it’s not. The common public is often shocked to hear this.”

Perkins explains that performance enhancers, true to their name, can only supplement training, and that actors do have to put in a lot of hard work in the gym and on their diet, working out twice a day and eating protein-heavy meals six times a day. “You can’t sit on your hammock eating Cheetos and get lean that way,” she says.

Bulging veins are a telltale sign of steroid use, according to the experts


This echoes what Sylvester Stallone said after he was busted with his stash of HGH, telling an interviewer it was not an elixir of youth. “I only wish it was true, you could just take something like that and you’re in shape,” he said, adding that he took hormones to minimise “wear and tear” after working out.

But that’s not to say PEDs are as useless as those Blue Zeus pills sold in the vending machine toilets of motorway service stations. There’s a great example provided by a

 that crops up a lot in the fitness world. Male volunteers were divided into groups: one was assigned testosterone injections and 10 weeks of strength training. Another group did training but took no testosterone. A third took testosterone but did no training.

The men in the testosterone-and-exercise group put on an average of 6.1kg of fat-free muscle mass. The men assigned exercise but no testosterone put on 1.9kg of muscle. The third group who did no exercise and sat on their asses for 10 weeks while receiving testosterone injections saw an increase of 3.2 kg in muscle.

Testosterone and HGH are available in the US on prescription, and there are a ton of fancy clinics in Los Angeles that offer them. Their treatments promise greater muscle mass, exercise capacity, and energy, as well as weight loss. One clinic quoted me a figure of up to $1,500 per month for HGH, plus $500 for a first consultation.

HGH is especially popular as an anti-ageing treatment, and has prominent advocates like Joe Rogan, Hollywood’s jack-of-all-trades who is best known for running the mosy popular podcast in the world. For a glimpse of what HGH can do, perhaps the most powerful human advertisement is

, an 83-year-old man whose name is genuinely Dr Life. He has the kindly face of your grandfather but thanks to HGH he has the body of Captain America, with abs so chiselled they look like a satellite photograph of the Grand Canyon.

"When millions of dollars are on the line, there aren't many things they wouldn’t do..."

Holly Perkins tells me she doesn’t recommend performance enhancers to her clients unless they knowingly ask for “suggestions” to achieve their fitness goals within tight deadlines. In which case she might connect them to the doctors of Beverly Hills who specialise in legal supplements. But most of the time a client will tell her that they’re already looking for a doctor that can “enhance” their gains.

An Average Joe, she says, could manage four high-intensity strength based workouts per week if they were training as hard as they could. “If he’s on a PED, we could get five or six workouts out of them and keep them healthy,” she says. “If there is outside support, I can push you a little bit harder, a little bit longer, and feed you a little bit less.”

Perkins says PEDs can be taken safely with medical guidance. A doctor will monitor a client’s hormone content in their blood several times a week, and provide them with injectable kits to be kept in the fridge. Any regimen should be “careful and educated”, she says, advising anyone considering HGH to “do your research to make sure you are working with a medical professional”. That’s because there can be a range of nasty side effects, like heart trouble, joint pain, diabetes, and gynecomastia, or the enlargement of male mammary glands.

Dr Jeffrey Life, the 83-year-old who puts his Captain America-grade body down to heavy testosterone supplements


On this last note, puffy nipples are a telltale sign that someone might be juicing. Other possible red flags – at least as far as physical signs go – include rapid muscle gains, lantern jawlines, and a low body fat percentage that might look unnatural if they have a large build.

, a fitness coach, warns that another potential sign is prominent vascularity, especially when veins pop out around the shoulders and chest with the appearance of worms. “This is because these veins are covered by a thicker layer of fat and tissue and the reason they are popping up is the increased amount of testosterone through steroid use,” he says.

For coaches like Perkins, the use of HGH is reasonable and can be compared to finding a smart accountant. “If you find a tax professional who is willing to fudge the laws for your benefit, that’s questionable territory,” she says. “But there are also tax professionals who are really good at optimising your tax liabilities, all perfectly legal.” The line, she says, is when celebrities or doctors try to push the boundaries of legality and safety, recalling Michael Jackson’s personal physician, who dosed his insomniac client with a fatal cocktail of sedatives.

However, not all fitness instructors are so open to PEDs.

, a celebrity trainer, says the use of performance enhancers is well known in his world, although he and his clients steer clear of them. “I’m not ‘for’ the use of PEDs but I do understand why Hollywood may be intrigued by the shortcut,” he says. “When millions of dollars are on the line, there are not many things they wouldn’t do.”

Mark Whalberg has long been the subject of PED speculation in the backwaters of the internet


For all the apparent ubiquity of performance enhancers, middle aged actors who have packed on enormous amounts of muscle in short spaces of time will aggressively deny using any type of chemical assistance, especially if they are in superhero or action roles. Mark Wahlberg, for instance, boasted about packing on 45 pounds of muscle in seven weeks before starring in 

 actor Josh Duhamel were named as clients of a jailed steroids dealer called Richard Rodriguez in 2018. Both deny the accusations. When quizzed by TMZ, Wahlberg said he was “all natural”, adding: “That’s hard work, baby”.

Not everyone is so credulous as to think that actors who transform into a muscle-bound hulk are doing it naturally. A subreddit called r/NattyOrJuice examines the interviews that actors give about their training routines with forensic precision, trying to weigh up if the star is secretly juicing or indeed natural, or natty. In response to the number of actors who say their radical change in body shape was entirely down to bicep curls and a diet of chicken and rice, the armchair sleuths of Reddit joke that the best route to a giant physique is to “sleep two minutes a month and workout three months a day”. But according to Holly Perkins, every actor with a superhero movie to sell will continue to keep it on the downlow.

“I do believe there is a taboo that shouldn’t be there,” she says. “It doesn’t need to be a dirty secret. Celebrities are held to a different standard – if they say, ‘I’m cheating’, they immediately lose respect.”

Perkins says it might be due to lingering associations audiences might have between performance enhancers and roid-rage hooligans beset by shoulder acne and the desire to punch holes in walls. But it could also be due to the unspoken pact between actors and their fans.

“There is this strange fantasy between this common person and the celebrity,” she says. “We want to believe they’re superhuman. They want to keep up the illusion that they are outside the bounds of ordinary. I don’t think they will ever start to open up the conversation.”

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