Many might recognize the name and face of Phil Simms for his color commentary as a CBS sportscaster. What many forget is that Simms had one hell of a football career that lasted an entire decade and a half. While he wasn't known for exactly blowing his competition out of the water with insane stats, Simms would make the right decisions to help his team get in the perfect positions to win football games. Simms played his college football at the Division II Morehead State University. The Morehead State Eagles were known for their ball control offense that didn't necessarily allow Simms to thrive in the pocket or take many risks delivering the ball through the air. Throughout his entire college career, the Eagles failed to make the postseason.
Despite a rather unfulfilling college football career, Phil Simms was drafted 7th overall in the 1979 NFL Draft by the New York Giants where he would play his entire professional football career. As a rookie, Simms won his first five games as a starting quarterback. Unfortunately, the first seven seasons of his NFL career was plagued with injuries and mediocre play which made Giants' fans and the organization question their decision to draft the QB so high. Fortunately, in 1987 things turned around for Simms and the Giants as he held them to a 39-20 victory over the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. In that game, Simms won Super Bowl MVP honors after throwing 22 completions out of 25 (88%) making his performance the highest completion percentage in a Super Bowl to date. Simms led the Giants to another championship in Super Bowl XXV before retiring after the 1993 NFL season.
Celebrities are no strangers to changing their looks for a role. And in some instances, they have to get pretty extreme. From 500-calorie-a-day diets to drinking pints of ice cream, Actors and actresses know what it takes to change their bodies in preparation for a new film.
Charlize Theron is no stranger to gaining and losing weight for movie roles, as we remember her transformation in Monster. Charlize Theron gained close to 50 pounds for her role as Marlo in Tully. Theron said that “for the first time in my life I was eating so much processed foods and I drank way too much sugar. … I remember having to set my alarm in the middle of the night in order to just maintain the weight.”
You’re used Chris Hemsworth's hulk-like figure in Thor, but In the Heart of the Sea required a totally different diet. The movie required the cast members lose a ton of weight to make their stuck-at-sea plight more believable. Chris Hemsworth said there were days when all he ate was one boiled egg, a couple of crackers, and a celery stick.
Anne Hathaway wanted to get serious for her role in Les Misérables, as she was playing Fantine, a starving prostitute with tuberculosis. So Anne Hathaway went on a diet of “rabbit food” to drop 25 pounds. Hathaway explained her diet was essentially just starving herself, but she didn’t want to give details, as she doesn’t want to encourage anyone to copy her emaciated look. She did note that she “just had to stop eating for a total of 13 days shooting,” however. And at one point, her bones became so frail that she reportedly broke her arm.
Matthew McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club, a man with HIV/AIDS, was spot-on, earning him the title of best actor at the Oscars. But it also required a serious physical transformation. Matthew McConaughey said he lost 38 pounds for the role. During filming, he said he lost a lot of energy from eating so little — and he hit plenty of plateaus along the way. Finally, with a strict diet, he got down to 143 pounds. And while he did cardio to help with the weight loss, he said it was 90% what he was eating and portion size.
Hilary Swank had to put on 23 pounds of pure muscle for her role as a boxer in Million Dollar Baby. The process doesn’t sound easy, however. “I started working out five hours a day — I had to eat 210 grams of protein a day,” Swank said. She also mentioned that she had to consume 60 egg whites per day, and when that proved too difficult, she had to drink them. And to keep the muscle on, she would get up and drink protein shakes in the middle of the night.