1. dumbbells, careful to avoid Harley’s Tesla
and hoping his neighbors don’t see me.
Dre doesn’t do any stereotypical trainer
screaming or “C’mon, one more, dude!”–ing.
Usually he just claps to get me to hurry up or
rolls his eyes until I do the exercise correctly.
But when I can’t figure out how to do a core
exercise that involves lifting my torso and
legs into a V and passing a giant yoga ball
between them, he says, “Picture yourself as a
backup dancer for Pink. You and three other
men are dressed as waves, in just Speedos.
You have to go up and down with the other
two, and you’re the only straight one, so you
have to represent or Pink is going to throw
you o≠ the tour.”
I finish the crunches.
Dre has no doubt he can give me
enough muscle to look like Maguire did in
Spider-Man. He just worries about me stick-
ing to the diet, which many of his clients fail
to do. “You walk out of here, I don’t know
what happens. Is your 5-year-old going to
call you a fuckhead and you’re going to get
angry? And wonder where he learned the
word fuckhead? And go eat a cheeseburger?
Or have a drink?”
Instead of a cheeseburger, I am eating a
lot of lean protein: eighty grams a day of fish,
shrimp, chicken, pork loin, bu≠alo burgers,
or flank steak. I am eating so much nonfat
Greek yogurt in smoothies and snacks that
I fear that when this ends, Harley is going to
hold a tub of Fage up to my face and cackle,
“It’s made of people!”
Except for the first two days, when I was
mistakenly using the girl-size recipes on the
left-hand pages of his book instead of the
superhero-size ones on the right, I never feel
like I need more food at the end of a meal. But
I do get hungry two hours later, even though
I’m eating five times a day. I used to be able to
eat something in the morning and go all day
without eating if I was busy. Now, instead of
being the background player to my brain, my
body is running the show. If I don’t eat, I get
cranky and have trouble concentrating. My
body is a demanding bitch.
And since it’s going through so much
change so rapidly, I can’t stop thinking about
it and looking at it. I’ve only been training for
ten days when I notice a muscle between my
neck and shoulder that I’ve never had, and a
rippled line between my chest muscles.
On Valentine’s Day, a month into my
training, I drink a couple of glasses of cham-
pagne and eat a quarter of a cupcake with
Cassandra. When I send my e-mail to Harley
that night, I consider lying. I realize this is
idiotic: I’m the one who wants to get into
shape; he’s just helping. Then again, avoid-
ing confrontation is exactly why I lie all the
time. Still, I decide (continued on page 105)
9 0 G Q . C O M E D Y A U G U S T 2 0 1 5 AndrewHetherington
STYLIST:JOSEPHTURLAATDEWBEAUTYAGENCY.PROPSTYLIST:ROBSTRAUSSSTUDIO.GROOMING:SYDNEYZIBRAKFORLAMER.SUIT:ISAIA.TIE:TURNBULL&ASSER.
SHOES:CHRISTIANLOUBOUTIN.SOCKS:HAPPYSOCKS.BRACELETS,FROMLEFT:CARTIER,DAVIDYURMAN.BRIEFCASEANDCANE:EARLYHALLOWEEN.ILLUSTRATION:WARDSUTTON.
So here’s a good one:
Paul Feig is the godfather of off-the-
cuff zing. The sultan of improvisational
snap. A man whose spontaneity (think
Bridesmaids and quippy summer hit
Spy) has made him the moment’s most
successful comedy director.
Which, actually, is really funny—
because Paul Feig is one uptight, finicky,
type-A, graph-paper motherfucker.
First, there’s his writing—he’s
an assiduous joke-tester. Then, there’s
the way he talks about his comedy
icons—in his mind they’re all on some
Cartesian plane, whereon he’s plotted
the precise moment their careers
began to stall (a reminder of even
comedy’s mathematical limits). And
then there are his three-piece suits—
unique among funnymen—for which
he’s reduced the tailoring to an
actual algorithm (multiple tailors,
minimum four fittings per suit).
All of which is to say, it makes perfect
sense that Feig was the one breaking
out the chem set at the Ghostbusters
lab this summer. He brings real gusto
to the…secretions in his movies (think
back to Bridesmaids). But the slime
for his all-gal reboot called for some
especially epic dorkitude. “We didn’t
want it to look like Pert Plus,” he says
gravely. One day in R&D, Feig spent
seven hours sampling colors with
Popsicle sticks and hollering orders
to a crew of slime day-laborers who
firehosed batches out of custom nozzles,
sprayers, and pumps—all in an effort
to test out spectral “dispersal patterns.”
His top three slimes moved on to a
screen test, where they were dumped
on heads and flung against walls
while he rolled tape. The result is one
secret formula (“tapioca flour!” is all
he’ll o≠er) but a variety of thicknesses.
“A slime wardrobe!” he confirms. “You
know, it’s sort of like working at Merck.”
A couple of other surprising
things Feig reveals about the movie:
First, forget the chubby cartoonish
phantasms you might associate with
the franchise. Feig is going for actually-
eerie, pants-shitting ghosts as the
anchor of the film and plans to use as
little CGI as possible. And second,
the movie itself will avoid screwball
goofs, going instead for a realistic
workplace-comedy vibe—the original
being at its core a proto–Silicon Valley
start-up comedy, its best moments
centered on a bunch of slobs ordering
Szechuan at the o∞ce.
Not that making a hyper-real, super-
scary buddy flick means any less
glop. “The cast is really excited to get
slimed,” he says of Melissa McCarthy,
Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and
Leslie Jones. “Sliming! It’s one of those
things you’re excited about. Till it
actually happens.”—SARAH BALL
Paul Feig is the kind of guy who sweats every detail,
then re-sweats it a few more times. He’s tinkered his way to
three straight hits—Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spy—
and next summer he’ll go for four with Ghostbusters,
his all-ladybuster reboot. To pull it off, he’s re-engineering
everything: the cast, the ghosts, even the slime