On HBO’s irreverent megachurch comedy The Righteous Gemstones, Tony Cavalero plays Keefe Chambers, who escaped Satanism to worship at the altar of Adam Devine’s character, the inimitable Kelvin Gemstone. In that role, Cavalero sports a mullet and a 666 tattoo on his chest. In real life, he’s a calorie counter and a bit of a muscle head. A self-described onetime chubby kid, Cavalero no longer evokes portly ‘90s comedy legends. He’s shredded now, thanks to five weekly gym sessions and healthy doses of creatine.
Cavalero leaves plenty of room for fun, though. A lax bro in college, the 41-year-old actor continues to play lacrosse recreationally, and when he called in for this interview, he was sipping out of a Big Gulp. (It just goes to show—you can become a vision of fitness and still ingest comically large amounts of sugary fizz.) For Cavalero, getting serious about his health didn’t mean avoiding 7/11, it meant getting in the sauna, discovering egg whites and low-carb tortillas, and picking up some saccharine pre-workout habits. He didn’t even need a televangelist nepo baby to guide him.
Photo courtesy of Sela Shiloni
GQ: Getting in shape—was that something that you just wanted to do, or did you do it to further your career?
Tony Cavalero: I was a fat little kid, man. I was like 210 pounds my freshman year of high school. So, I was a little porker. I actually made a name for myself, because my brother was a senior when I was a freshman in high school, and he’d introduce me to the senior girls and be like, “This is my little brother, Tony. He weighs 210 pounds and he does an amazing Chris Farley impression.” I’d do that whole pet scene from Tommy Boy, where he crushes the biscuit.
But that being said, I was always very active. My parents put me in dance [class] when I was like five years old. Then, of course, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out.
Sure.
I did Taekwondo for like a decade. Then, I got to high school and [entered] full jock mode with football, wrestling, and lacrosse. [I was] pretty much addicted to sports. I really wanted to play Division 1 lacrosse, so I got laser-focused on that and ended up going to play at the Virginia Military Institute. I was really dialed-in with strength training and exercise and moving my body. There’s never been a time in my life, really, where I wasn’t doing some kind of physical activity at all times.
The cool thing is, when I moved to LA and I started doing improv and sketch comedy, all of that physicality lent itself to my comedy. It gave me a unique point of view and perspective. I was always the one dancing on stage, or throwing himself through a table, or falling through boxes, or doing pull-ups on stage. Chris Farley, Jack Black, those guys and what they did with their bodies was such an inspiration for me. My background in martial arts and dance and sports allowed me to do some things that not everybody could do.
Well, that’s interesting because you said you were 210 pounds as a freshman in high school. And then, does the weight just immediately come off? Is it a gradual thing? What do you look like in college?
I wrestled my sophomore year [of high school] and I weighed 171 [pounds]. Once I started wrestling, it came off. But I’ve never been super lean. That’s a new thing that happened for me. It’s funny, like I said, I’ve always done lots of activities, physical fitness, everything. But I really didn’t learn about diet, honestly, until like the last year and a half. I found out what a calorie deficit is, how much water you really need to be drinking, what your fiber intake needs to be. The weight does not come off me easy. We are a husky family, the Cavaleros. Last year I was prepping for a movie right before Gemstones. I wanted to have a really radically different look, and so I dropped about 15 pounds. It was supposed to be this really cool thriller with Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson. I was going to play an ex-con and I had to look pretty scary. My comp in my mind was Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, so I dropped all this weight. Then the financing fell through on the movie and it didn’t happen. So, I showed up for Gemstones on my first day and they’re like, “Dude, you’re so ripped. Are you cool? You’re going to have to be this way basically the whole season.”