Matthew Willig On Gaining Weight to Play Andre the Giant On Young Rock, This Week’s Andre-Focused Episode

Matthew Willig currently co-stars as Andre the Giant on NBC’s Young Rock series, and the actor discussed gaining weight to play the legendary wrestler in a new interview. Willig spoke with Russ Weakland of Hollywood Life about his transformation to get into the role, this week’s Andre-focused episode and more:

On gaining weight to play Andre: “They didn’t even ask me to gain weight. I knew I needed to. I needed to have that Andre feel. He wasn’t a guy that worked out. He wasn’t buff or cut up. He was just Andre, you know? I kind of had to eat myself into that. I gained about 35 pounds, which is a lot of weight, and I am not a small guy to begin with… I have been as low as 275 and have beefed up in the last year and hovered around 295ish. On my frame at six-eight, I don’t look fat at all, but I knew I needed to add fat. Thirty-five pounds was tough. I did it in increments three months before I shot, including adding the last 10 in Australia while in quarantine and nothing to do, so it was a little easier at that point. But again, I tried to make sure that when my shirt was off and trunks, I wanted to have that Andre look as much as possible.”

On learning Andre’s accent: “The first challenge was the accent, and I know there are critics who will say things, and I know people said I sounded Russian. But Andre’s accent was so unique that I worked with a French dialect coach and sort of learned the speech patterns of the French and some of the words he would say or interpret into English, and that was a big challenge. And then from that, he was very lazy with his talk. He had a really big tongue, and there was a lot of mumbling. It was challenging to hone in on the voice.”

On this week’s episode: “It is not really talked about, hasn’t been talked about, but it was a surprise to many people, including myself. Dwayne did a great job in explaining it and basically saying that he was Uncle Andre to me. Even though he was this massive human being, he had this ability to come down to my level as a kid. He loved kids, number one, and he said that Andre really had an affinity for him. There are some cool lessons in there that we explore, and it was a lot of fun to shoot. Working with little Adrian [Groulx] was amazing. I love the kid to death, so it made it very special to shoot that with him.”