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Modern action movies often come with the caveat that actors must be in extremely good shape to film. Dwayne Johnson and some other action stars regularly work out to keep themselves in incredible shape, but others do not enjoy going to such extremes. In fact, The Rock’s Baywatch co-star Zac Efron really put himself through the ringer to get himself extremely fit for that film. It turns out that maybe wasn’t the best thing.
Everybody from The Rock to Alexandria Daddario had to get in great shape for Baywatch. Zac Efron has previously spoken before about how he now feels his Baywatch body was “stupid” because he felt it required so much work that it should be seen an unobtainable. However, in a new interview with Men’s Health, Efron talks more about what the work did to him not only physically, but mentally and emotionally, and it was not good.
I started to develop insomnia and I fell into a pretty bad depression, for a long time. Something about that experience burned me out. I had a really hard time recentering. Ultimately they chalked it up to taking way too many diuretics for way too long, and it messed something up.
One likely goes into doing this kind of work with some expectation of what it will mean physically, with extensive workouts and a change in diet. Regardless, Zac Efron shows there’s another side to getting superfit for film. Putting your body through diuretics to look camera ready can have an impact on you in other ways.
From everything Efron says his workout was on the extreme end of what actors have put themselves through. The actor says his abs looked so incredible they actually looked fake, and getting himself from looking good to having abs that were almost literally unreal took a lot of extra work that pushed his body much harder. He continues…
That Baywatch look, I don’t know if that’s really attainable. There’s just too little water in the skin. Like, it’s fake; it looks CGI’d. And that required Lasix, powerful diuretics, to achieve. So I don’t need to do that. I much prefer to have an extra, you know, 2 to 3 percent body fat.
While lots of actors go through workout routines to get in shape for superhero movies or other action franchises, many don’t need to go quite as hard as Zac Efron did for Baywatch. In superhero films they sometimes even get to wear costumes that mostly cover their bodies, so if their abs aren’t perfect, it’s not that big a deal. Not only that, with all the CGI in those movies, if they wanted to give stars CGI abs, they likely could.
Nobody wants to have to work so hard for a role that it actually harms them. The good news here is that Zac Efron was ultimately able to recover from the ordeal that was Baywatch, and now he knows what his limits are, so he won’t push himself past them again.