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The World's Biggest Nerds Are All Shredded
We're well aware that the average Cracked reader has 10% body fat and a rippling six-pack, but most people of a nerdy persuasion don't have the time or interest required to maintain a physique that could get them into the Olympics. But when Hollywood casts its biggest stars as incredible nerds, they still remain in perfect shape, no matter how little sense it makes in the story. Look at A Beautiful Mind, wherein Russell Crowe plays an obsessive math genius struggling with severe mental health issues, all while looking like he could bench-press Princeton's entire graduating class.
Universal PicturesOne of his ongoing hallucinations was way into CrossFit. It didn't come up much in the movie.
Or take Swordfish, in which Hugh Jackman plays the world's greatest hacker while having the exact same body type as when he plays Wolverine.
Warner Bros. Pictures"No, I don't work out. I wrote up a program that does it for me. It's amazing what you can do in Python."
Sure, being a nerd doesn't make it impossible to work out, but nothing about these characters suggests that they've ever been to a gym, let alone spent half their waking hours there. The real John Nash looked like he couldn't risk going outside whenever the wind picked up, but Crowe portrayed him as if math was the subject he was only pretending to study until he was selected in the NFL draft.
This is clearly because the actors have to maintain the kind of atypical bodies that Hollywood demands from its stars, but these days, even actors who don't generally do action have to be ripped, no matter how much it clashes with their characters. Chidi from The Good Place is almost entirely built around indecision and fear of commitment, yet look at him. So the one thing he could commit to was an extensive daily workout routine?
Universal TelevisionTo say nothing of some serious waxing.