Simon Pegg’s physical transformation for his upcoming film Inheritance somewhat broke the internet, as he got shredded and dropped to 8% body fat.
People were pretty impressed with the actor’s new physique – but Simon’s wife Maureen McCann wasn’t among those fans.
Simon, 49, has admitted that his wife of 14 years was ‘in tears’ at his new appearance as she disliked him being ‘skin and bones’.
Speaking to the Mail Online at MCM Comic Con, the Star Trek actor said: ‘I did have to get very, very skinny for a job I did this year and my wife was in tears about that, because I kind of got down to just skin and bone, so she wasn’t happy about that.’
However, he did heap praise on Maureen, saying: ‘She always grounds me. She stops me from being a head-in-the-clouds actor p**ck.
‘As soon as I get home I’m picking up the dog s*** in the courtyard, though I do have a courtyard which is p**ckish, to say the least.’
Back in March, personal trainer Nick Lower shared a picture of Pegg’s new body, writing: ‘#SimonPegg 6 month body transformation for #InheritanceMovie The brief for this role was lean, VERY lean. It required a specific body shape & look.’
He explained that Simon had dropped from 78kg to 69kg in his body weight (losing 19 pounds) and gone down to just 8% body fat from 12%, through a mix of stength, circuits and core training and a ‘sound nutrition plan that worked for him and his goals’.
Speaking to Metro.co.uk, Nick said: ‘I took the picture and posted it on my Instagram, and didn’t really know what to expect. It sort of went crazy. For some reason, people still think of Simon as the guy from Run Fatboy Run. But over the last six, seven years, he’s not been anywhere that – certainly since he turned 40. So a lot of people, to see him in that shape, the everyman, it was shocking.’
Nick, who works with Rebourne Fitness and Nutrition in Hertfordshire, has been working with Simon ever since he finished filming 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, and got him into shape for The World’s End.
However, for his role as Morgan in the upcoming thriller Inheritance, Pegg was going for a very different look. Nick told us: ‘It is drastic. It’s different. The remit was, his character has been trapped in a basement for 30 years, so he’s not going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was kept alive and he did exercise, but the brief was very, very lean. He’s in shape most of the time, but for this movie he had to get down to single figure body fat, which we achieved. We had a set period of time – about six months to knuckle down. The movie actually got delayed, and we’d peaked a bit early, so we just carried on.
‘We kept his calories in check and he trained very hard. Simon had one rest day, then he would do our sessions and extra cardio. We didn’t do anything magical or out of the ordinary – we made sure Simon had the right balance of macro nutrients and we trained a lot – a mixture of strength training and circuit training and some cardio added on to make sure we achieved that calorie deficit.
‘Essentially, it’s got to be a mix of strength training. Strength circuits work really well, where you hit as many muscle groups as you can in one session, keeping it high intensity, then move onto 10-15 minutes of cardio or ropes. But then we trained so much we could spread it out a bit – we would maybe do core and legs on one day, and move onto other sections for two days – but Simon had the luxury of time for training. He did a lot of cardio on top of that as well.’
Nick added: ‘It’s not maintainable and it’s very hard. It’s going to take a lot of training. Simon may have had one day rest, but he worked hard every day and he was strict, and that’s how he got those results. But it’s a short-term thing, you do not want to do that long-term.’
Simon admitted that the response (and not just Maureen’s) to his body was ‘so weird’, telling GQ that it ‘wasn’t meant to be an aspirational thing’.
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