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
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