Tim Holmes from “Oz the Great and Powerful” in The Detroit News

By Tom Long

Tim Holmes had gotten the part. He was set to play Strongman in “Oz the Great and Powerful.” It was a dream come true.

And then he had to take his shirt off in front of director Sam Raimi.

“I’m sitting in a little onesie bathing suit-leotard thing. And man, I was out of shape, bro,” Holmes says on the phone from Los Angeles.

“This was like a year into me and my wife having twins. I was sleep-deprived; I hadn’t been to the gym in over a year. I weighed about 220 and it was not in-shape 220.“

“Sam was like, ‘You’re going to work out, right? We’re shooting this thing in six-to-eight weeks.'”

Holmes, who was born and raised in Lansing and still lives there much of the year, worked out; twice a day, in fact. And he started gorging himself — “Ice cream, weight-gaining shakes three times a day, steaks, carbohydrates, potatoes” — in an effort to add more and more muscle to his frame.

Read the rest of the interview in Detroit News