After losing more than 200 pounds and throwing himself into weight training, actor Ethan Suplee recently launched a podcast, American Glutton, in which he shares stories from his recent fitness transformation and speaks with experts about weight loss and the issue of obesity. During the first episode, Suplee recalled how a chance encounter with actor Jim Caviezel on a transatlantic flight played a surprising role in kickstarting his weight loss.
Suplee ran into Caviezel in an airport lounge while waiting to fly to Europe to film Cold Mountain, and remembered “getting really strange vibes from him.” But it wasn’t until he was sitting on the plane that his encounter with the Passion of the Christ actor got truly bizarre.
“First class on the plane was pretty empty and he was not sitting next to me, but at some point he got up and came because the seat next to me was open. And he sat down and he started talking to me about how he and his life emulated Jesus Christ,” Suplee said. “And that if you don’t do that, you’re gonna go to hell. And basically the gist of it was I was not emulating Jesus Christ. And it was the first conversation of that nature that I’d ever had with somebody. Nobody had ever talked to me like that. Nobody had ever said: ‘Look at yourself, you’re going to fucking hell… You don’t care about yourself at all, you’re a mess.'”
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Suplee went on to describe how the conversation made him feel, and how Caviezel’s invasive approach helped motivate him, even if the content of what he was saying wasn’t exactly applicable.
“He wasn’t mean, but it was a thing I had not experienced,” Suplee said. “I remember landing and going, ‘That was an awful experience. But what am I gonna do, fight Jim Caviezel?’ He didn’t call me a fatass or anything, he didn’t say anything I could have challenged him to a fight over, but I was so knocked on my ass by this conversation that I literally was like, ‘I don’t want to ever allow somebody to feel that they can talk to me that way again.’ He was probably coming from a place of love, compassion.”
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Suplee added that he held no ill will against Caviezel, and that soon after their conversation, he went on a diet. “The first diet that I went, ‘Oh, I have a chink in the imaginary armor I’ve been wearing, and I haven’t been thinking about that.’ And here comes this guy who sits down and says all this stuff to me, and I didn’t enjoy it, and I’m not saying he’s right or that my decision had anything to do with Jesus Christ, but my decision was, ‘I don’t want people to feel they can talk to me like that,'” Suplee said.
In the next episode of the podcast, Suplee’s friend, actor and director Kevin Connolly, offered his own thoughts on Caviezel’s approach to that conversation, expressing concern that such a forthright, judgment-laden lecture that connects weight to morality might easily have done more harm than good.
“I don’t think Jim Caviezel’s intentions were bad,” Connolly said. “But on the other hand it’s like, fuck off, mind your own business… He could have killed you. He could have sent you on a bender, who knows.”
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