Ron Lester still has the same natural charisma that made him a hit in the late 1990s. His amiable Southern drawl is reminiscent of the good ol' boy football player he portrayed in Varsity Blues. His sweet engaging smile recalls wannabe rapper Sugar Daddy, his character on The WB's cult TV show Popular. Still, it's no exaggeration to say these days he looks like a completely different person. The actor has dropped almost 350 pounds since his Popular days. He's leaner, healthier, and happier. And he's basically had to rebuild his once red-hot acting career from square one.
Not so long ago, Lester was carving out his own niche in the Hollywood landscape. The actor was on the rise, thanks to his crowd-pleasing roles as loveable overweight kids. As his career started to take flight, he found himself gaining more and more weight. He was about 460 pounds during the filming of Varsity Blues, and he topped out at more than 500 pounds on Popular. At the end of the show's first season, the actor's concern for his health and future happiness prompted him to decide to lose weight. He underwent an experimental form of gastric bypass surgery, in which most of his stomach was removed.
"I came back for the second season of Popular, and I only lost, like, 100 pounds, but it was enough for them to have to write in this one cheesy little line. [The character played by] Bryce Johnson had to come up and go, 'Yo, Sug! You losing weight? You look good!'" Lester chuckles at the memory. "That was it, that was the whole, 'Okay, we've got to [acknowledge] Ron losing weight.'"
Popular was cancelled at the end of its second season, and Lester took time off. The actor had plenty of cash, thanks to his successful acting jobs, and he decided to take the opportunity to enjoy life. "I went on these little binges of spending because now I can buy new clothes, and I was taking different trips, and I was scuba-diving," he remembers. "I was doing pretty much anything and everything I could do that the former fat guy couldn't. I'm going, 'I'm in retirement; this is cool. I'm thirtysomething, and I'm retired. How many people get to say that?'"
After lounging in "retirement" for about three years, Lester decided to get back into the acting game, but he was surprised to find it wasn't as easy as he thought it would be. The high-profile work he'd done no longer seemed to matter: After losing such a massive amount of weight, the industry didn't see him as the same actor. "Just because I had the credits [didn't] mean the doors [were] going to swing open," he says. "I literally had to start repitching and promoting myself, and I didn't really know how…. I tried different managements and different agents, and it was a hard sell. Not too many people know how to take [a person who was once] 508 pounds who's now a 173-pound guy, and go, 'Oh, yeah, he was the fat guy, but now he's this.' So they'd pitch me to casting directors who knew my name, but they didn't know what I looked like. And then I'd walk in, and they were, like, 'Well, uh… you're totally different.' I was, like, 'Yeah, but you've got headshots. You knew I was smaller when you saw the headshot.' 'Yeah, but we didn't really realize it was you.'"
Going Down?
Lester's tale of starting over is familiar to other actors who have undergone major weight loss; if the folks in Hollywood's appearance-obsessed industry have already pigeonholed you as a certain type, it's tough to make them see you in a new light.
Michael Genadry, who played high school student Mark on NBC's critically beloved Ed, has lost 225 pounds since undergoing gastric bypass surgery in 2002. The procedure involves dividing the stomach into two compartments and connecting a portion of the small intestine to the smaller section, which becomes the working stomach. Genadry opted for "banded gastric bypass," which added the step of placing a plastic band around his new stomach to ensure that it wouldn't expand too much. "Health-wise it was the best decision I ever made. I have no regrets regarding that, and if I had it to do over again, I'd do it exactly the same way," he says. "Career-wise it was a bit of a curse. Since that show ended, I've had no parts. I think I've had one, maybe two auditions in the last two years. It becomes a problem for the industry when they can't put you in a category anymore. When I was fat, it was so easy to put me in a category: 'He's fat and he's young, and he's got that baby face. So we've got two places we can put him. Either he's the geek high school student who has no friends and he's the dumbest kid in school, but he's really funny. Or he's the college student who's the defensive back for the football team and has been hit in the head a few too many times and he's the dumbest kid in school, but he's really funny. So we'll put him in either of those two places and that's it. We'll get Not Another Teen Movie, Volume 4 out.'"
Genadry, who currently works in the box office of a live music venue to pay the bills, notes that it's tough when the industry no longer has that convenient category for you. "Acting-wise I'm pretty much starting over again," he says. "When I made all these changes I was on TV for a little while, but I was on TV in New York. The New York scene is very different from the L.A. scene. Now I've moved to Los Angeles, but I look completely different from anything that was ever shot in New York, so no one here recognizes me. As far as they're concerned, I'm just new, fresh meat. I'm pretty much just reintroducing myself to the world. People will get to see me again, but it might be awhile to wait for that. But that's okay because the industry has to get used to me, and I have to get used to me, too. That's a major change, and even I don't know what to do with myself at this point. Everyone needs time to readjust."
This brings up another important point: When an actor undergoes a major physical transformation, folks in the industry aren't the only ones who have to realign their perceptions. The actor does, as well, and sometimes that can be just as challenging. "Sometimes I forget I'm not the fat guy," says Lester. "And I'll go in, and I'll joke like I am, and I go, 'Wait a minute, these people don't even care. They want to see me now. They want to talk to me now. Half of them don't even remember me as the fat guy.' It's awesome to have that opportunity to be a completely new person. In this industry, it's hard as hell to do."
Actor Katsy Chappell, who went from a size 22–24 to a size 10 in 2003, dealt with similar identity issues. "I am still really unable to see myself as thin," she says, noting that she has a tendency to hide behind large clothes. "I don't know if I'll always be in the mind of a big girl, but I carry that around."
Prior to her weight loss, Chappell played a lot of "character big-girl roles" and was also a successful standup comic. She's hoping to get back into standup soon, but she finds herself facing the need to redefine her onstage persona. "I lost a lot of my act," she says. "I was a Star Search semifinalist for the first round with the Sinbads and the Rosie O'Donnells. I beat six men in five shows. Not all of it was about being large, but that persona, the jovial jokester, is now gone, and I am trying to define what persona I am coming from now. I feel funny talking about being heavy, because people don't want to believe you who don't know you, who don't know you've been there, so I have had to approach it in different ways."
Non-Plused
Even though these actors face the challenge of redefining themselves to the industry, they also see career advantages to losing the weight. Yes, it means Hollywood can't put you in a category anymore, but in a way, that can be a good thing: It opens up the opportunity for different kinds of roles.
"Casting directors who have seen me are just truly amazed, and you can see their faces light up: 'Ooh, more categories for her,'" says Chappell, who says she now goes out for a variety of roles. She played Hippolyta in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last summer. "I would not have been offered that role at a larger size," she says.
She says she now wants to do it all. "[Before I lost weight], I didn't think about that, I thought, 'I'm gonna be the funny girl next door,'" she says. "That was it. I pigeonholed myself. And it is no longer that way. The carpet has been put out and laid before me, and I just have to step on that red carpet and go."
Genadry also looks forward to playing diverse roles. "I'd love to get to the point where I get to try almost every single type of character before I die," he says. "I've gotten to play the high school geek with the heart of gold once; now I'd kind of like to branch out into other things. I'd love to play a romantic lead, I'd love to play a bad guy, and I'd love to do my own stunts in a movie. I'd love to have all of those experiences. Like I said, since I'm starting over, it's probably way off in the distance there somewhere, but you take everything one step at a time."
Lester says his work status is starting to turn around. He's relishing the opportunity to play new kinds of characters. "It's really awesome because my people are actually putting me out for either lighthearted roles or action films," he says. "In fact, I recently booked an episode of CSI: NY—with my hick accent, by the way. It was actually supposed to be one of my first jobs this year. I played a bad cop, which I thought was awesome, because I never, ever get to play the bad guy."
Unfortunately, Lester was injured a few days before filming and couldn't do the episode. Happily, however, producers and casting directors on the show were so impressed with him that they still want him to do a future episode. "The best thing about it is, they're not willing to just give me any role: They actually want me to play something specific, and I think that's great," he says. "If they just wanted to use me, they could just give me some little one-liner or guest star or something like that. This way, it's a very substantial role, and I just think that's a huge compliment."
Tips on the Transition
If you decide to lose weight, actors and reps have a few tips as far as smoothing the transition and rebuilding afterwards. Says Tony Martinez, an agent at the GVA Talent Agency, "Not just weight loss, but [for] any kind of dramatic change in your physical appearance, it's really important your agents know what you're doing, because then we can prepare for that, and we can pitch that. The worst thing you can do is do a massive weight loss in private, not tell anyone, and then your agent keeps sending you out, and then you walk into a casting office and they're, like, 'Oh, my God, what happened to you?'"
Look at the team you have working with you and make sure it's still the right fit. "Talk with them," says Lester. "And if you don't feel they're 110 percent behind you, then you have to have the discussion. And that's a scary change, by the way, because when I decided to change my structure and who I was working with, I was afraid that because no one knew who I was or recognized me—casting directors and producers and stuff—I wasn't sure how agents would respond."
Lester is thrilled with the team he's working with now. The key, he says, is that they all believe in his skills as an actor and don't just see him as the former fat guy. "I've got great management, I've got a great publicist, and I've got a great agent," he says. "And these are people who go, 'You know what? Yeah, it might not be the easiest sell,' but they're willing to take the challenge, instead of just going, 'Well, we'll let the credits just work for us, and if it happens, great.' No. They believe in my ability, not just who I was, which is the biggest help in the world."
As for getting people to see you in a new light, manager Darryl Marshak of The Marshak/Zachary Company recommends that you try to get cast in an independent or student film that allows you to showcase your acting chops. "When you do something like that, then all of a sudden they go, 'Oh, my God, look at him!'" he says, citing John Travolta's image-revitalizing role in Pulp Fiction as an example.
After all, without your established persona to hide behind, you're back to basics, and you need to show the industry the thing that got you in the door in the first place: your talent. "It's, like, 'Oh, I was known as the funny fat guy next door. Now I'm the character funny guy next door.' Well, is that what you do? Show us," says Marshak.
And when it comes to one key piece of advice, all the actors are unanimous: If you decide to lose weight, think carefully about your purpose. "Are you doing it for health reasons, are you doing it for image, are you doing it for your own personal happiness? Because if you're doing it for image, you could totally screw yourself," says Lester. "Me, I did it for my personal well-being and happiness."
Adds Genadry, "The industry's going to do with you what they want anyway, but you can't let the industry dictate your life to you, because you're not in it for them, you're in it for yourself. No matter how much adoration you're trying to grab from them, in the end, it's all for you. Do your own thing, and then the things that you want, maybe they'll happen, maybe they won't happen. But at least you're going into it with the right frame of mind: You're doing it for you and no one else."
And hopefully, once you've adjusted to life in your new skin, your talent will start to shine through. "I lost my identity, I lost my footing, I lost all kinds of things. But you know what? I gained so much more," says Lester. "Now I've got an even better opportunity at an even better career. I have a longer life to enjoy those opportunities, no matter how long it takes to get back to where I was, or further than where I was." BSW