It is impossible not to notice Paul Mescal’s muscles in Gladiator. They’re profoundly there, bulging and making themselves known, peeping out from beneath leather and armour, slightly tanned, very pronounced. But only 12 weeks before filming, Mescal was starring in A Street Car Named Desire in the West End with a much, much less bulky body.
As a woman who lived through the 1990s and therefore saw many ‘transform your body in a few months’ exercise videos and even tried some of them out, I know that 12 weeks isn’t really a lot of time in terms of the body. I also know that making significant changes is slow work, irrespective of how much energy you assign to the task.
So how did Mescal do it? His personal trainer Tim Blakeley, whose company Media Physiques prides itself in delivering for, as the name suggests, those in the public eye, tells me that I am correct in my belief that big transformations usually take more time. “Paul’s quite lean, and while I could see he had good genetics, we didn’t have time to do much bulking, which involves gaining muscle and fat.”
Instead, Blakeley took another route: “we ate into his existing body, chiselling it out, then added lean bulk.” In practical terms, that meant a hell of a lot of work on the part of the Irish actor, who Blakeley says unfailingly turned up every single day to exercise with him at state-of-the-art gym Topnotch Soho. His workouts were structured between theatre performances, lifting “heavy weights to give his muscles the stimulus to grow.”
It apparently helped that despite Paul not having done any “serious weights for a while, he had some muscle memory from his past.”
Sessions were split into three groups initially: push, pull, and legs, after which they’d focus on a single body part each day. According to Blakeley, Mescal’s a pretty perfect client, who is “very body aware, so I could teach him an exercise and he’d pick it up really quickly; tell him something once, and he’s got it.”
If you’re going for the Mescal muscles though, you need to know three things: first, you need to be careful with those weights (“doing it as safely as possible is a huge factor”), and, second, your diet needs to be on point, too. “80 per cent of it is nutrition. You need to be in a slight surplus of calories with a hard template of protein and essential fats,” says Blakeley.
Mescal’s also referred to having a lot of help on getting his Gladiator physique, and Blakeley confirms that this is categorically true, with meals being boxed for the actor to make getting the balance right simpler, while he had a weekly massage to help muscles recover.
While the actor committed to much exercising without a word of protest, he had one stipulation on the lifestyle element, telling Blakeley that he “liked to have a drink and smoke.” Rather than berate him, Blakeley found this honesty helpful, telling me that “lots of clients lie to me, and while drinking on this sort of schedule isn’t optimal, him being open about the odd few drinks meant I could bear that in mind and work around it.”
So there you have it: a regimen that’s intense, sure, but clearly yields results – even if you have a few cheeky pints down at the pub afterwards.
