Zac Efron has opened up about the extreme regime required to produce his “Baywatch” body and warned others about the devastating effect it had on his long-term well-being.
In an interview with Men’s Health, the actor said achieving the shredded look in the 2017 action comedy came at a cost to his physical and mental health. Efron played Matt Brody, an Olympic swimmer who becomes a lifeguard to rehab his image after a controversy.
“That ‘Baywatch’ look, I don’t know if that’s really attainable,” he told the magazine. “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.”
Efron said he was taking diuretics, overtraining and eating the same three meals every day while also not getting enough sleep due to filming and his intense training regimen.
“I started to develop insomnia,” he said. “And I fell into a pretty bad depression, for a long time. Something about that experience burned me out.”
“Ultimately they chalked it up to taking way too many diuretics for way too long, and it messed something up,” he added.
It took six months after filming wrapped for him to feel better.
He said he was talking about it now because he wanted people trying to achieve that body to know how damaging the process was and how long it took him to recover.
He’s currently bulking up for an unnamed new role, he said, but he’s taking a different approach to his training this time and won’t be trying to get into the same shape as he was in for “Baywatch.”