He used to earn £2,000 an hour flexing his muscles on TV.
Now, former Gladiators star Warren Furman - better known as Ace - has revealed he sometimes struggles to earn £20 an hour since the show finished.
The muscle man enjoyed living the high life filled with fast cars, first-class travel and no shortage of female attention during his time as one of the ITV programme’s stars.
But suddenly he found himself jobless and searching for work on a building site, worrying about how he was going to make ends meet.
Gladiators aired between 1992 and 2000, racking up a total of eight series, with Warren joining the show in series five, the MEN reports.
He appeared on ITV's This Morning on Thursday and spoke of his "crash down into the real world" as he adjusted to life away from the hit Saturday night gameshow.
He told hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield : "When you've had something like that and it's taken away from you and you're not earning a living out of it anymore, and all people want to know is daft stuff - well it seemed daft because now I wasn't earning any money.
“I came crashing down into the real world. I could earn £2,000 an hour on Gladiators, now I'm lucky if I could get £20 an hour.
"Then people are coming over like, 'What's Ulrika like? What's Wolf like?' and in the end I was a bit like, 'I'm not actually public property any more, I'm just trying to make a living, so I don't really want to talk about it anymore.'
"I know that sounds conceited, but I felt like I was living in the past.”
The bodybuilder also spoke of his doomed relationship with Katie Price, whom he dated in the late 90s during the height of her glamour model days as Jordan.
He said: “We were very similar people, we both grew up in similar circumstances, working class.
“We both took our clothes off for a living in a way. I wore the lycra. We had a lot of time together as well.”
Addressing why they split, he added: “We were both deriving our identities from being relevant in the media. We were both selling stories.”
This Morning airs weekdays from 10.30am on ITV.
