A-list Hollywood actor suddenly jacked at 62

One of the Hollywood’s most respected A-list actors is suddenly totally ripped.

Ralph Fiennes plays the legendary Greek war hero Odysseus in his latest movie, The Return – and the Oscar nominee underwent a massive physical transformation for the role.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Fiennes revealed he worked with a personal trainer for five months, including an intensive 10-week period before shooting began when he embarked on a gruelling regimen of running and weight training.

Director Uberto Pasolini had given Fiennes specific instructions about how he wanted his leading man’s body to look.

“Uberto was very clear. He didn’t want me to have a sort of bulked-up gym body,” Fiennes told the outlet, confessing that he instructed his personal trainer to make him look “like a bit of old rope”.

Lookin’ mighty Fiennes.

Fiennes said he wanted to look like “a piece of old rope.”

Fiennes documented his progress in the gym with occasional photos, several of which have gone viral on X this weekend in the wake of the film’s release.

Fiennes also has several nude scenes in the film – and said during a Q&A screening in London this week that it contributed to his quest to get his body right for the character.

“In the script it was clear – the nakedness. In The Odyssey, he throws off his rags, so it was clear that I had to show my body,” he said.

“I wanted it to be believable as a man who’s fought and sailed and swum and has not eaten very much.”

Fiennes and his The Return co-star Juliette Binoche. Picture: Jeff Spicer/Getty

Fiennes in the film.

Director Pasolini confessed to The Guardian that he was initially sceptical that Fiennes’ intense diet and exercise regimen would achieve the desired look.

“I have to confess, I was slightly suspicious that there was so much protein going in and so much exercise that we would have a body that looked exercised instead of a body that was consumed, a lived body,” he said.

“There is no gym in ancient Greece.”

The Return marks the third time Fiennes and Juliette Binoche have starred in a film together, following their 1996 Oscar winner The English Patient and, before that, the 1992 big-screen adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.