Brandon Sklenar felt a personal connection to his former bodybuilder character’s struggles with body dysmorphia in Iron Jane.
“I’ve trained with Mr. Olympias and seen them pose — the diets, the steroids, everything,” Sklenar, 36, explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published Tuesday, November 10. “And there is an element of Iron Jane that really goes into body image and body dysmorphia, which is something that I just really feel needs to be talked about more, especially in this age of social media and fitness influencers.”
He continued, “This is something I’ve struggled with, so we really wanted to translate that, and [writer and director] Lissette [Feliciano] was really open to working with me on getting across [my character] Josh’s dysmorphia and what he goes through.”
When asked whether he felt comfortable discussing his own struggles with body dysmorphia, Sklenar shared that it’s something he’s navigated since childhood.
“I was a little kid — short, chunky,” he said. “I swam in a T-shirt and got made fun of. Then I had a growth spurt and became really lanky, and I got made fun of for that. So I started training a lot and got obsessed with working out, like, ‘I’ll show them.’ And then it became a kind of obsession, and it becomes a very weird thing, where you see yourself completely differently than pretty much anybody else does, and usually in not a good way.”
He continued, “It’s very much an ongoing process. Therapy helps for sure. If you look at me now as a 36-year-old man, you’d never guess it, but I still very much feel like that 12-year-old chunky kid — that sense of nothing is ever good enough. You have to find a way to check your self-talk, because that’s really where it begins and ends — but it’s easier said than done.”
Iron Jane follows Janie John (Eiza González), a woman who pursues competitive bodybuilding after a difficult childhood. Sklenar’s Josh, a former champion, takes Janie under his wing and helps guide her transformation.
“There is a scene where my body is fully on display, and I’m posing, and the camera’s panning up and down — and I was so nervous,” Sklenar said. “I’ve been pretty much naked in a film before, but it’s a whole different thing to literally be posing and have the camera panning up and down your body, detailing everything. When I was shooting that scene, I was so uncomfortable. Dealing with my issues, it was very challenging to work through that. But at the same time, I was thinking about Eiza, because she had to do that the entire f***ing film. Every scene is about her body on some level. So, I was like, ‘Goddamn, if I feel this way, I can’t imagine how she feels.’”
Sklenar shared that his costar “put in serious f***ing work,” adding that “it’s really hard for women to put on that amount of muscle.”
“My partner is a trainer and a nutritionist, and I know how difficult it is. You’ve got to eat so much,” he said. “But Eiza trained her ass off, and she got in incredible shape for this film. I just have so much respect for her.”
