Unlike boxing, which gives his “Creed III” character a sparring partner to dismantle, bodybuilding was a more solitary pursuit for Jonathan Majors. He told Deadline:
“You don’t have anybody around you when you’re working out, three times a day. And you’ve got to eat seven meals a day. You are pacing up and down your apartment, force feeding yourself the food you need to grow. That isolation and physical commitment does breed a certain amount of emotionality, and distance. The gift of adversity is, you get to learn from the role. I learned things about my body, my spirit and my emotionality, and how I connect to people.”
While exploring Killian’s mentality for “Magazine Dreams,” Majors also said he had to go to some “extremely dark and extremely lonely” places. “For the character,” Majors explained, “the frustration is I can do something most men cannot do, and yet, there’s no real value there.”
Like Travis Bickle, Killian is socially maladjusted, and even when he gets the woman he likes to go out on a date with him, it isn’t necessarily going to end well. This returns us to the “Taxi Driver” idea of “God’s Lonely Man.”
“I looked up Killian,” Majors added, “and it means ‘little church,’ and there’s something religious about all of that. There is something extremely spiritual about the bodybuilding.”
In the end, Major called bodybuilding for “Magazine Dreams” “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” noting:
“There’s a point where you really meet yourself and it becomes true emotional lifting. That weight is no longer, 310 or whatever. It’s not that anymore. It’s abandonment, my own stuff, my dad issues, my insecurities. I had to come up against all of that in the gym.”