On Friday Ricky Hatton announced his return to the ring; hardly
earth-shattering news considering he has shed three stone over the past year since
ballooning after ‘retirement’. His ability to rocket up numerous weight
divisions after a bout is the stuff of legend, as is his ability to drop the pies
and a few layers of blubber in the process when he fancies a scrap.
In recognition of the oscillating Manc, I’ve compiled a
little list of people whose body transformations have dropped jaws across the
globe. I’m staying away from the Marie Claire-style makeover approach, and we
can also pretty much take Michael Jackson as read…
Christian Bale
In order to play a chronic insomniac in The Machinist in
2004, Bale decided to drop as much weight as he could without dying. His
obsessive nature took him way beyond the expectations of director Brad Anderson;
he ended up losing five stone and resembling a heroin addict with a
pre-existing eating disorder. How did he manage to drop such a substantial
amount of weight? What tailor-made, medically monitored method did he use? Always
a man to do things on his own terms, Bale used his own sophisticated approach of
only eating when he felt ready to collapse and running for hours at a time.
In fact, five months after filming for The Machinist, Bale
performed an even bigger full body transplant by gaining seven and a half stone
within five months to bulk up for Batman Begins. Coming from a man who said
‘working out is incredibly boring’, he stuck to the task pretty admirably when
inflating himself into Bruce Wayne shape. Interestingly, Bale said that while
emaciated, he felt ‘calm and serene’ compared to the ‘big mood swings’ he
experienced as a beefcake Batman. We can probably imagine which version of Bale
on-set lighting engineers prefer.
Jodie Marsh
Life was becoming increasingly hard for Jodie ‘Look at
me!!!’ Marsh and by 2006, after being evicted from Big Brother, she even seriously
contemplated suicide by driving into a tree. Well, happily she’s now turned her
life around, by making a spectacle of herself in a more legitimate way: becoming
a bodybuilder. A diet of eggs, eggs and eggs combined with up to four hours a
day at the gym and a shit-load of fake tan (applied nearly to the point of causing
racial offence) has taken her to the heights of victory at the International
Natural Bodybuilding Federation championships in Washington DC. Throughout her
physical transformation, one important part of her body has remained the same:
her heart. Just joking. Her breasts. Her breasts have remained the same.
Carrot Top
Achieving some success in the late 80s and 90s as a rake-like
flame-haired comedian using a suitcase full of props for his ‘unique’ brand of
humour, Scott ‘Carrot Top’ Thompson soon disappeared from the edges of fame
into anonymity. He tried his hand at acting in a series of straight-to-DVD-bargain-bin
films, but for some reason it never quite worked out for him. So he decided to work out for him. Totally
not using steroids, Mr Top gradually built his way up from an eccentric- but
human- looking nerd to an obscene image of vascularity.
Not content with only one form of physical reconstruction,
his face has also gone through a disturbing metamorphosis. He has raised
eyebrows in more way than one, as his default facial expression has now been
set to ‘surprised’ by the wonders of Botox. Regardless of what anyone may think
of him, he’s certainly managed to harness his natural uniqueness to unsurpassed
proportions; he’s hardly likely to merge into the background in a police
line-up.
Diego Maradona
A man who needs no introduction, Maradona’s natural
inclination towards the finer things in life- cocaine, booze, hog roasts and
the like- took him to nearly 20 stone at the age of 44 (a feat inevitably
awaiting Ryan Giggs). In 2005, Colombian doctors performed a gastric bypass on
the footballing legend-turned-giant-football, who practically halved overnight.
By the looks of his bare ankles and forearms as he flapped around the dugout at
the 2010 World Cup, Maradona celebrated his surgery by buying a new suit, and
never bought a larger one as he gradually re-inflated. He’s levelled out a
little over the past couple of years, and is now back in Argentina at his
spiritual home, hanging out the terraces at Boca Juniors, after being sacked by
Dubai club Al Wasl FC for predictably showing no interest or ability in
actually doing his job.
Lana Wachowski
In compiling a ‘top 5’ list of people, it’s
rare you can include four men and two women. Larry Wachowski, as she was known
up to ten years ago, was always known as one of the two Wachowski brothers, who
directed the Matrix films and V For Vendetta. Lana went her whole life feeling
like she was trapped in the wrong body suit, and after years of trepidation
about her family’s reaction, decided to take the giant leap and announce
herself as a woman to her parents in 2002. Wachowski recently told the New
Yorker magazine that her mother’s perplexed response was ‘But I was there when
you were born’. Her family have all been
resolutely supportive though, and Lana said because of this, ‘everything else
has been a piece of cake’.
As is her right, she likes to keep details of
her anatomy and any surgery she has undertaken very sketchy. After divorcing
her first wife in 2003 for a blonde dominatrix called Ilsa Stix (as you do),
Lana has since married her second wife in 2009. Larry must therefore have endured
the presumably confusing experience of being a lesbian trapped in a man’s body;
something that will always bring the amazing Mr Garrison from South Park to
mind.
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