Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 663, with guest Ethan Suplee, actor and host of American Glutton.

Getting Started in Acting

Tom Rowland: Alright, Ethan, how are you today?

Ethan Suplee: I'm good, sir, how are you?

Tom Rowland: Man, I'm just doing fantastic, I'm really happy to have you on the podcast, I've been a fan, I've certainly followed your career, it's very easy to follow, some of the most iconic movies of our time you've been in, and if you look at your IMDB page, it's crazy, you've been so prolific in what you've done, it's just wild, and you've had these opportunities to be in these incredible movies and play these incredible characters, it's just really been very cool to watch. How did that start for you?

Ethan Suplee: I kind of left high school early, and I had a bunch of friends, I was raised in Los Angeles, and I had friends who were actors, and it really seemed to me like the best way to work without getting a job was to be an actor, that was very appealing when I was a teenager, and so I went out and found an agent who would represent me, and basically the first day of auditions I got two jobs, and I took one, and that was a show called Boy Meets World in the early nineties.

Tom Rowland: Wow, what a start, that's pretty uncommon really, you always hear about the struggling actor that tries so hard and just auditions and auditions and auditions, what do you think the difference was that you had such luck right away, or maybe it's not luck, maybe it's preparation meeting opportunity.

Ethan Suplee: I mean, as far as that goes, there wasn't a huge amount of preparation, it's acting, just coming up with a character is very different from what you actually do when you're making a television show or a movie. When you're learning acting, it almost seems like all of those settings are built for the stage, and the actual nuts and bolts and technicality of acting for television or movies is really different, everything's chopped up into tiny little pieces, and then occasionally you'll get to run through a scene one time in a master shot, but then the detail comes in the close-ups. I think I was just lucky, to be honest with you, I went and happened to audition for a couple of things that I was right for on day one and started working, and I got to do Boy Meets World for like three years, which was also crazy.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's awesome, man, and then your career just progresses, and one of my favorites of all time is Remember the Titans, that was so good, and you were so good in that one, we just watched that movie the other day with my son, he'd never seen it, and man, that movie makes me cry every time, there's so many good actors in that movie and the story is so good, those kinds of movies always get me, like Rudy and Miracle, I'm a sports fan at heart, and if you get a movie that can really tell that story, it's iconic.

Ethan Suplee: That's a special one for sure, it's hard to do, I definitely feel like I've been in a handful of movies that are really good, but it's hard unless you're one of the main people making these decisions, I'm just going job to job basically, and I feel like I got very, very lucky many times.

The Weight Loss Journey

Tom Rowland: In your career, one of the things I've followed is this weight loss journey and this relationship you have with food, and you're quite open about it on your podcast, American Glutton, I really like your podcast, I've listened to a whole bunch of them, it's really good, very interesting conversations, really about food and the relationship with food and your journey. I look at you like the David Goggins of weight loss, because Goggins talks about the theory of mindset and this and that, and he's like, I am it, I have done it, and that's you, you have done this and been at these places, and I think so many people giving advice on weight loss and mental preparation haven't experienced what you have.

Ethan Suplee: It's such a tricky thing to really even talk about, because we're inundated endlessly with what I think of as get-rich-quick-scheme diets, where a person just has to make one tweak, or they're sold on a thirty day program, and look, if you want to lose five pounds, maybe that's all you need. But most of the people I'm talking to, and a large portion of the country at this point, is rapidly becoming morbidly obese, and I don't think any of those one-shot solutions, whether it's stop eating seed oils or be a vegan or only eat meat, is a solution for a bunch of nuanced issues that have overtaken your life to get you to the point of being hundreds of pounds overweight. If we don't have a perspective shift on that, if we keep looking for simple one-shot solutions to obesity, we're never going to get there, as proven by the amount we continue to get more obese by percentage. Every year there's a new thing, now coconut oil is a big thing, and you're fine if you just eat coconut oil and put butter in your coffee, that's all you have to do and you won't be hungry ever again. I'm sure if David Goggins put butter in his coffee it might fill him up for the day, but he can also run an ultra marathon, so I'm talking to people who can't do that. We've gotta have a perspective shift on our entire lives to combat this thing we're mindlessly doing.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, there is a lot that is mindless, because maybe you're eating the same thing you've always eaten, but the food's changed, you like these particular types of meats and vegetables, but now they're coming in a different looking package and you don't know the difference, you just eat the same type of thing your parents ate. And I'm trying to eat healthy, and I hear people say, well, I'm eating clean, what does that mean? I have to ask them, what is eating clean to you, what is eating healthy, what is watching your diet? I just like having the conversation with people who've been very successful with it, or the other way, that it's never quite worked for them, and I wonder what it is about certain people that it's worked and they've lost tremendous amounts of weight and kept it off, and other people try and try and it just never seems to work.

Ethan Suplee: By the way, I've done every one of those get-rich-quick-scheme diets, I've done them all, I've lost weight and gained it back on every single one, because none of those diets address the rest of your life. It's possible to lose a bunch of weight by making one alteration, but is that alteration going to be enough to get you down to a really healthy weight? Maybe not, and if it's not, how are you going to make the adjustments to continue losing weight if you need to? And if you do get down to a certain weight, how does that diet set you up to stay there?

Tom Rowland: Yes.

Ethan Suplee: I often thought about weight loss as this magical thing, like Buddha sits beneath the Bodhi tree and achieves enlightenment, and I would think about weight loss in those terms, like if I just lose two hundred pounds, I will be cured, and it just doesn't really work that way. I'm also a sober person, and it's the same thing, I've gone through rehab a number of times, many years ago, and you come out of rehab thinking, well, the drugs are out of my system, I'm done, I'm good, that's no such luck, you gotta really work at your life to put it back together. I don't know that this applies to everybody, but it applies to enough people that if you've been a drug addict to the point you need rehab, it requires a little more work to stay clean once you're out. Similar to weight loss, you lose the weight and you go, well, now I don't need to work at this anymore, and it's like, well, not working at it got you to be obese, because that's what you're conditioned to do.

Building a Sustainable Approach

Tom Rowland: That's a great start to the conversation. So where do you go from there, in your case you seem to have really gotten it under control recently, because you're jacked, man, you got a six pack, that was one of the things you said you'd achieved, your dream of having a six pack, and you look at your Instagram, you got a six pack, so how do you lose three hundred pounds and not only do that, but also achieve a level of fitness that's incredible, that's gotta be something that's not just a calorie-in-calorie-out kind of thing, that's a mindset thing you've had to work on.

Ethan Suplee: Yeah, it's less so now because I've got my life structured in a way where, twenty years ago, I was just gaining weight day in and day out, now it's structured so the gym is part of my life six days a week at least, occasionally if I get restless I'll do a light day on Sunday too, I have cardio machines at my house, I take my dogs on walks every day, my life has become more active physically. And through really meticulous care, I've determined how much food my body can eat to maintain this size, so if I want to lose weight, I know I just cut out a little bit. But it required the destruction of a ton of bad habits, like eating late at night, eating out of boredom, eating out of happiness, or eating to comfort myself, all that had to go out the window, those are boundaries I don't cross. Not to say I haven't had the odd Christmas or Thanksgiving where my wife and kids say, can you please, we made this dish, you've got your abs, you've got a good jawline, can you please try the dish we put all this effort into, and then I go, yes, absolutely, I can let my hair down that way, but just very occasionally.

Tom Rowland: That's where you go a lot on your podcast, that's a relationship with food, you cut out the celebratory meals, the depressed meals, the stress meals, the boring meals, and you develop this relationship that food is fuel. What I'm curious about is, when you're talking about determining how much food you eat to maintain your size, I'm sure over this journey you've talked to nutritionists, every possible person who could help, and I'm wondering, when it gets right down to it, is it you that's ultimately in charge of it now, or are you still consulting with professionals?

Ethan Suplee: No, no, let me say this to you right away, Tom, because this is something I've actually gotten some pushback on social media for, people saying you're a rich actor, you have a chef and trainers, not true, I have no personal chef, I've never been that wealthy, I know a couple of guys who are chefs and they're really, really rich, so I think in order to get that you gotta be really rich. I've been to all manner of nutritionists and dietitians and I've had personal trainers, but this is over the last twenty years, and with each of those I lost weight and then gained it back. So the tool I used five years ago that helped me was a Google search for a basal metabolic rate calculator, and I got a number, and then I spent two weeks monitoring that number, it said a certain amount of energy could be consumed by me per day, and they call it calories, and this word calories really upsets people, so I call it energy, because that's what it means, we've got these body machines that we put fuel into, and the metric we use to weigh that fuel is calories. The Google search number wasn't exactly accurate, I actually had to go below that, and it took me a couple weeks, and then I had this number, on a low exertion day, here's the amount of energy my body needs just to exist. And based on that I constructed what I ate and did some trial and error, found some stuff where when I eat it I don't feel great, or I'm hungry right away, and that stuff started to fall by the wayside because I don't like being hungry, especially when I know I'm eating enough. And it had nothing to do with nutritionists, this was five and a half years ago now. There was a point before that where I was doing keto, and I got to where I wasn't losing weight on keto anymore, so I got super strict and still wasn't losing weight, so then I started restricting my food on keto and started losing weight again, and I went, wait a second, if I have to restrict my food, because the whole point of keto is eat whatever you want, if I've got to restrict my food, what's the point in this? And guess what, I added rice and bread and pasta back into my diet and watched my calories and started losing weight again.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Ethan Suplee: So that's my big warning to people, especially with massive weight loss, if you start at five hundred pounds or three fifty pounds, and you do something that says you don't have to pay attention to what you eat at all, the amount of energy your body needs to maintain its weight, or the amount you need to reduce to get into a deficit, is going to change so much when you lose fifty pounds that if you just continue eating the same thing, you're not going to lose weight anymore. This to me is the big fallacy of trying to use keto to handle massive obesity.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, because you can be keto and consume a tremendous amount of food, you can eat tons and tons of meat, it obviously isn't working for everyone because it's not working for everyone, it works great for some people.

Ethan Suplee: And I'm not knocking it for those people, do whatever works. But I love what you're talking about with the food app, because one of the big things that helped me was just journaling in the beginning, I did eventually find a food app too, but I first just started writing everything down, and writing down all its values, and doing math all day long, and I was like, oh, now I know what the value of this is in terms of energy for my body, I just didn't know that before.

Tom Rowland: And you didn't know, like, oh, I could eat a tablespoon of this or a bowl of this and it's the same thing, I can eat a bowl of broccoli or three potato chips and it's the same carbohydrate value. When you're writing it down, you learn this is the value of this, but also what a lot of people don't realize is, this is a carbohydrate, a vegetable, and junk food, this is a fat, this is a protein, and how these all come together to make your daily caloric intake, and sometimes you're about to eat something and you're like, I don't want to write that down, so you just put it back, it's the act of writing it down or putting it in the app. For me it's like these little circles, if I put that in there, the one that I've got, Carbon, the diet coach, that's Lane Norton, do you know him?

Ethan Suplee: I do, he's awesome, that app will make adjustments for you.

Tom Rowland: But you can also put in whatever you want and go, whoa, that sends me to the moon, I'm taking that out, and then you can test it and see. That's been really good for me. As far as exercise goes, you're doing a lot of boxing, what are you boxing so much for these days?

Ethan Suplee: It literally was this idea I had at the beginning of the year, because I hadn't been doing a lot of cardio, and I'm not a good runner, I have terrifically flat feet, the last real romance I had with cardio was on a rowing machine, and I jumped on a rowing machine early in the year and I was so bad compared to what I'd been able to do before, I did a full marathon on a rowing machine once, and that was discouraging, and I thought, what can I do where it doesn't matter that I'm bad, and I was like, well, I'll go do some kickboxing, because I don't need to be good at that, I've never been good at that.

Tom Rowland: Right, so Mike Chandler introduced us to one another, did you meet him through boxing or a gym, or how do you know Mike?

Ethan Suplee: I think we knew each other on social media, and then I wound up going to a gym, not realizing he was there doing a training camp, and that's how we met.

Tom Rowland: Oh, nice, he's a great dude, I really enjoyed spending some time with him, he's one of those guys that's very good at inspiration and motivation, he's transcending his sport and will easily be a speaker or personality in that space, I think, I really like him. But the boxing is a good workout for sure. So you also like cycling, right?

Ethan Suplee: I haven't done that in a long time, but that was one iteration of weight loss where I rode a bike eight hours a day, six days a week, got really thin, and then crashed and gained a bunch of weight back.

Tom Rowland: So that's not the answer either. Can you exercise your way to it, is it in the kitchen or the gym or a mixture of both and mindset, it seems like it's all three.

Ethan Suplee: I really do think it's all of it, whatever amount of energy you use in the gym, you're gonna use a lot more just in your life, moving around the house or the way you talk, if you're animated when you talk, that all costs your body fuel, so I think it's everything. For me, I do think it's mostly the kitchen, that's the vast majority of the problem I had, I was fairly sedentary, but I think that came because I was overweight, and the biggest hurdle for me isn't that I want to sit and do nothing all day, it's that it was really tiring at five hundred and fifty pounds.

American Glutton and Fishing Dreams

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I can imagine. What are you working on now?

Ethan Suplee: I've got a few movies coming out, a movie called God Is a Bullet, and one called Babylon, and one called Manodrome, and I'm just doing my podcast.

Tom Rowland: How do you manage, do those all shoot at the same time, I've always wondered that, when I was looking at your IMDB thing, you'll have some years with a bunch of credits and a couple years where it's just one thing.

Ethan Suplee: I very rarely have had two jobs at the same time, then there's all kinds of scheduling nightmares when one job goes later than it's supposed to and you've already agreed to start another. So I try to make sure there's at least some cushion between them, but it tends to be a few months very busy and then a few months of not very busy, and that's when I work on the podcast.

Tom Rowland: Do you stack the podcast up, do a bunch of episodes and release them regularly?

Ethan Suplee: Yeah, once a week, that's the best for me, I'll try to record one a week and I'll always be about three weeks behind, so there's three episodes banked, but I'm still trying to record one a week.

Tom Rowland: And your podcast, American Glutton, what was the idea for starting that?

Ethan Suplee: A buddy of mine, Kevin Connolly, another actor, started a whole podcasting company, and he asked me a number of times to do a podcast with your friends. I'm pretty much a political contrarian where I think of all politicians as criminals, there's no team that's off the hook in my eyes, and he and my friends would often have these discussions, and it didn't matter who they brought up or what side, I would take the opposing view, and he wanted me to do a podcast like that, and I was like, you're crazy, dude, I'm a Hollywood actor, I can't do that, I can't talk about politics, I certainly can't be a contrarian. And I finally said, I'll do a podcast, but I just want to talk about health and fitness and setting physical goals and believing in yourself, and he said okay, and I found it was really helpful to me to talk about this stuff, and amongst a group of people who share my ideals with sobriety, talking about that is also super helpful, but I didn't have that really with weight loss, so it was like, well, I can talk to people about this in the form of a podcast.

Tom Rowland: And has the journey taken twists and turns, or have you stayed consistent, this podcast that I'm doing has taken all kinds of twists and turns, I basically find people I think are interesting and talk about things I'm interested in, a lot of times that's fishing, health and fitness, leadership, and then I get a chance to talk to somebody like Mike Chandler or yourself, and to your point, it's been as helpful to me as a tool to learn more, a tool to become a better communicator, and a tool to have really interesting conversations, in this world of cell phones it's hard to sit down with somebody for an hour and get to know them, even across a computer screen, but it's taken lots of twists and turns and gone nowhere I thought it was going to, so what's your journey been like with American Glutton?

Ethan Suplee: There have been so many people where, before doing it, I would see somebody say something or read somebody's book and think, god, I'd love to talk to that person, and now, to your point, I can, because I can send an email or have my producer get in touch with them, and go, would you come on my show? That's been invaluable to me, because I have, I didn't even graduate from high school, so I have no real education, but I'm super interested in things I'm super interested in, so I'm a sponge for that kind of data. I've had Layne Norton on my show, and just having a conversation with him is fascinating, because he's this PhD scientist, and no BS, he's like, here's what the evidence says, that's it, and it's really, really fun to have those conversations.

Tom Rowland: I've done the same kind of thing with him, he likes to fish, so there's a real commonality, on the way back from a trip I dropped in at his house and worked out with him and dropped off some fish and did a podcast with him in his house, that's what we were supposed to do today, but our plans changed, we'll do that. So I saw a picture of you on Instagram with a little bass, what's your experience with fishing?

Ethan Suplee: That's about my total experience with fishing, but I am super fascinated by it, I really want to get a boat, and I had this whole idea about what a boat was for a long time, and then I went and started looking at them, and come to find out I really think the center console fishing boats are much cooler than the kind of boats I was thinking about. And then I was thinking, that's pretty weird, because I don't really fish, am I gonna start fishing? And I thought, that could be cool, and I went on this trip with my family, and it wasn't the most exciting trip I've ever been on in my life, but I found I could throw a fishing lure in the water and be completely captivated for four hours straight, not looking at my phone, not thinking about anything, and I was like, that's really fun. So I am definitely interested in fishing, especially that thing, it felt like it put up a fight, but it was like a six ounce bass.

Tom Rowland: It was a tiny little thing, we need to get you down to The Keys where you can mix fishing and food and go out and catch some fish you can eat, like mahi or snappers, and then it's a whole different experience with food, because you're gonna eat it in a way that you want to and keep some, that's really fun, I like that a lot. I think you'd like it, the Keys are beautiful and awesome, you're not very far away, we should definitely get you down there. The boat thing, the advice I'd give you is start small.

Ethan Suplee: Yeah, I've been on boats, over in Europe where you sleep on the boat and it's fancy, and I'm like, that's way out of my reach. But I thought there's this one boat that's much smaller but still got a couple bedrooms, and we went and priced them, and I had no idea, it'd be like buying another house. And then my wife was like, okay, I want you to dumb it down, go to the smallest thing you'd be thinking of, and that still was the price of a house, just not a mansion anymore, still a fairly nice house. So that was a rude awakening how expensive these things are.

Tom Rowland: They can be really incredibly expensive, and on top of that every boat's a compromise, so you're saying, well, I want to fish this little pond for bass but also go out and catch mahi on the weekend offshore, so you either need two boats, or a boat that's not gonna do either one very well, or does one really well and the other poorly. But the boating world is interesting, and you're in a great place around South Florida, being able to go to the Miami Boat Show and the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show and see every type of boat under the sun in one place.

Ethan Suplee: I've been to both of those boat shows, and I just walked out going, my wife's never gonna be okay with any of this, because even some of the tenders for the bigger boats are hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that's just to get you to the dock.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, but it doesn't have to be like that, the funny thing about this conversation about choosing a boat, and the conversation we had about weight loss and fitness, is you have to find something that's going to enhance your life, not cause undue stress and turmoil. If you go buy a seven hundred thousand dollar boat and your wife thought it was gonna cost twenty, and it's all you want to do, and you spend all your time waxing it, and it's taking away time from the family, and nobody supports the idea, as opposed to finding a boat that's family-oriented that everyone has a good time on, it's going to enhance your life. Just like a diet program, you're gonna do something that makes every part of your life better, and your wife and family and loved ones are gonna support it, as opposed to the cabbage diet, where they support it for a little while, but then the house smells terrible all the time and they get fed up. But finding a boat is kind of like that, you can get into the space fairly inexpensively, and boats hold their value very well, if you start small, get comfortable with that boat, then it's time to go a little bigger, and if you've only put a year on that boat, it's almost worth what you paid for it. Especially right now with the supply chain thing, outboard engines are incredibly hard to come by, so if you can get a complete, turnkey boat ready to go, people are willing to pay over market price, because otherwise they're gonna have to wait a year and a half.

Ethan Suplee: I've also gotta show her that I can park it, is that what you say?

Tom Rowland: Well, you say dock it. That is a challenge, and putting it in the water from the boat ramp, but a little bit of instruction goes a long way, or if you've never done it before you end up on that Instagram called the Qualified Captain.

Ethan Suplee: Yeah, I watched that one, that's pretty great.

Tom Rowland: You don't want to end up there. There are a lot of issues where people go from the intracoastal out to the ocean, those inlets can get incredibly rough, and the big deal is when someone's in the bow of the boat, which you should never have, because the bow is going eight feet up in the air and slamming down, people going unconscious in the bow and taking a huge amount of water over it, they really shouldn't be doing that. Someone good at it will keep their speed right and surf down a wave and accelerate into the next one, and you'll go through there no problem, but even a great captain, it can still be very challenging, and some people just set up a camera and sit there and wait, because they know they'll get something.

Ethan Suplee: I have a question for you about docking, we have a boat lift, and on it somehow you get the keel in between these two things, that seems unbelievably hard to line up.

Tom Rowland: No, it won't be, because once you get a boat you'd fit it to the boat lift, there'd be pipes on the side to help guide the boat in, PVC, and you'd bump into the pole on one side or the other, and it'll keep you from going too far one way, and you can get the boat to slide on there just like a trailer, and then lift the boat lift out of the water, you could get familiar with that very quickly. Within half a day you'd have it down, and if there's a cleat on the dock you'd get the steering wheel to a certain mark, and you'd be able to get it no problem, it just takes four or five times.

Ethan Suplee: Right, but this is the stipulation my wife made, I have to prove I can park the boat.

Tom Rowland: Well, that seems fair, having someone show you how to do it, and once you do it a couple times on your own, maybe a couple more times before you're super comfortable, but you'll be able to put it back in the same place the same way every time. Depending on what kind of boat, some can be hard to handle when the wind's blowing, but putting it on a boat lift shouldn't be a big issue. How big is the boat you were considering?

Ethan Suplee: Forty feet.

Tom Rowland: So maybe they might need to adjust the boat lift, it could be set for a much smaller boat, even though it's a very powerful lift, the previous owner might have had a much smaller boat, so you could move those out and set it up for the boat you'd get. But forty feet, a thirty-six to forty foot boat, that's legit for sure, that's a big boat, probably at least two engines, if not three or four, so there's a learning curve, and it might be that a twenty-six is where you should start.

Ethan Suplee: Is that something you can take into the ocean?

Tom Rowland: Yes, for sure, we have a twenty-six Yellowfin, one with a single engine and one with twin engines, and we'll go way out into the ocean on the right day, and if it's the wrong day for a twenty-six to be out there, I'm not sure you'd want to be out there in a thirty-six either. The whole thing about boat size is expectation, where exactly are you thinking about going, under what weather conditions, and what's a good choice to start. A lot of people get too much boat, and it's overwhelming and hard to handle, and they're uncomfortable and never use it, and they've got a three hundred thousand dollar or five hundred thousand dollar boat sitting there they're afraid to use, and that's not what you want. I'd say start smaller, get a boat you can use inshore, get comfortable, go offshore on the right days, and then maybe upgrade in a year, go from a single engine to twins, from a twenty-six to a thirty-two, and then it's not as big a jump.

Ethan Suplee: Take some time, yeah, and until then my wife will keep trying to sell me on a kayak.

Tom Rowland: Well, kayaks are fun too, sure, it's just not quite a boat.

Movies, Career Highlights, and Closing

Tom Rowland: What, when are these movies you're working on now coming out?

Ethan Suplee: Babylon comes out around Christmas, I believe, I'm not sure, sometimes you do a movie and have no idea when it's gonna come out.

Tom Rowland: I've always heard these interviews with actors where the movie just turns out amazing and they're like, I didn't know it was gonna be so good when we were doing this. Which ones have you been surprised about that turned out better than you thought, or you just had no idea and they turned out to be iconic?

Ethan Suplee: Well, I had a movie that had really weird stuff happen, called The Hunt, which I really liked, I actually thought it was a really good movie, and it was so right up my alley because it kind of made fun of every political side. It was supposed to come out October 2019, and they ran ads during the Democratic National Convention, and the Democrats were enraged because the preview looked like it wasn't a pro-Democrat movie, and then the next weekend there was a shooting, and this movie's called The Hunt, and the Democrats were so pissed off they pulled the movie. Then Trump got mad at the movie and said it was anti-Republican, so the Democrats said, oh, okay, we'll let that movie come out then, and then he got pissed off and said this movie's an attack on Republicans, which it's not, it's an attack on politics. And then there was another shooting, and they said, we can't release this movie right now, the Democrats hate us, the Republicans hate us, this is too much, and the next release date we got was March 13, 2020, which was the weekend everybody stopped going to the movies.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, so that was one that kind of came and went.

Ethan Suplee: I really thought that was, it's a comedy and it's super violent, so there's that, but I thought the humor was really smart.

Tom Rowland: And did it ever come out?

Ethan Suplee: Yeah, it came out that weekend, nobody went to see it because COVID had just begun.

Tom Rowland: That was right when the NBA shut down, right, in March, that's when I think about when COVID started, that certainly got my attention, hearing the NBA just canceled the rest of its season.

Ethan Suplee: Yeah, that's the weekend they decided to release our movie, and it might be on HBO now, but it's around, it's called The Hunt, and that was one of those where while we were shooting it I thought, I don't know how this is gonna be, and then I really liked it, I actually genuinely liked it.

Tom Rowland: I've always heard that with actors, either it turned out way better than expected, or you thought it was gonna be pretty good and it didn't come together the way someone envisioned. Last question, what's been the movie or series that you've liked working on most, whether because of the director, the other actors, or I don't know, do you have one that stands out?

Ethan Suplee: Yeah, my all-time favorite job was a television show called Chance, we did two seasons of that, it's on Hulu, that's my favorite job I've ever had.

Tom Rowland: I know that one, the funny thing is I was just telling Jake, our producer here, he had this one I was watching, and about that time it came out, that's when I decided, man, I'd really like to get this guy on the podcast, so that was one of the things I did, I watched that whole series because I was trying to learn more about you, and I was following this whole journey, and then I put everything together, I'm like, oh, that's the guy that's been in all these other movies and had this incredible weight loss journey, and it just seemed like I could have a great conversation with you. And I watched that one and it was spooky, and you were great in it, there was a good balance between Hugh Laurie and you and the story, it was just pretty cool, Jake and I were talking about it and he hadn't seen it yet, and we watched the trailer yesterday, but that one was good, what was it about that one that you liked so much?

Ethan Suplee: I like playing a smart person, I don't often get to play a smart person, and I really knew what I was doing in that, which was really fun, and I was tough, I'm not often tough.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, well, you were in that one, that one was pretty awesome. Well, cool, man, it's been great to get to know you a little bit, and hope that we'll be able to go fishing together, and we'll get you down to the Keys, that would be awesome. So are you working all through the winter, or should we try to get together?

Ethan Suplee: Let's try to get together, I mean, look, I have some sporadic work planned, but I'm not leaving the country or anything.

Tom Rowland: Okay, cool, well, we'll stay in touch and we'll get together, and really appreciate you coming on the podcast and telling us your story.

Ethan Suplee: It's awesome, thanks for having me.

Tom Rowland: Hey, thank you, okay, we'll be back next week with another awesome guest, just like Ethan.