The Strain star still sees ‘fat kid’ in the mirror
NEW YORK — “I chose a very strange profession for someone who had such body issues,” says actor Corey Stoll, who, at 38, not only has a thriving career but also a ripped physique that could shame a couch potato into hitting the gym.
Still, he can’t dismiss his past. As a teen he was fat — very fat — he reports, with his six-foot-two frame then carrying some 100 pounds more than his current 210.
Starring in the new FX Canada thriller, The Strain, Stoll has leading-man charisma as a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hero pitted against a viral outbreak threatening the planet.
What turned him around in high school, after topping out at 310 pounds, was a showcase where his teacher proposed two possible roles: The Hunchback of Notre Dame or the Elephant Man.
“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to only be playing Quasimodo for the rest of my life, so I better lose some weight.”’
He installed his parents’ exercise bike in his bedroom and pumped away by the hour while The Smashing Pumpkins blasted. His improvised diet: White rice and V8 juice.
“I was doing it all wrong,” Stoll laughs. But it worked. He says he shed 100 pounds.
Viewers of the Netflix drama House of Cards can get a head-totoe look at him in the buff in the series premiere’s bedroom scene. And in Episode 5, a tour de force interlude with star Kevin Spacey leads to Stoll, undressed, planted in a bathtub.
In those sequences, filmed a few years ago, he’s clearly in terrific condition.
“I’m not quite in that shape right now,” he says with a selfeffacing laugh. “But I’m OK.”
Even so, he still sees a fat kid in the mirror, he says, an admission that should comfort those who see only flaws in their reflection.
“I chose a profession where everybody looks at me!” he marvels. “But I guess you go toward what’s hard for you. I used to think I had to fight to get over it. But at this point, I’m at peace with the fact that I have a certain degree of dysmorphia,” that chronic concern over a perceived defect in one’s physical appearance.
In a weird way, that remains a useful tool for him to draw on as an actor.
“No matter how successful I get,” he says, “I’ll always have easy access to what it feels like to be that outcast, to feel separate, with that level of self-loathing. It’s not who I am now, but it’s there. And it’s never gonna go away.”