Aldis Hodge knows that an actor’s work extends far beyond their physical form. While audiences might look at him and simply see the 38-year-old playing homicide detective Alex Cross, legendary rapper MC Ren, or football players Jim Brown and Brian Banks, they may not know that behind the scenes, Hodge has endured multiple back surgeries and intense mobility exercises that “whoop his butt.” But, thanks in part to his background—Hodge grew up in a military household and still believes that a disciplined mind is the key to finishing a grueling workout—there’s no physical challenge too daunting for him.
The second season of Cross is in the can but does not have a release date yet. Before it drops, we caught up with Hodge about embracing painful workouts, how he makes room in his diet for his favorite Japanese candy, and gaining 30 pounds for a movie role.
GQ: Are you pretty diligent about staying in shape?
Aldis Hodge: It depends, man. Sometimes I’m diligent, other times—my health, I think like many people’s health—is often tied to their emotional state and mood. So, if I’m in a good progressive state, happy, flowing, everything’s good, it’s easier to keep a schedule. When emotions are down, or when you’re distracted, or dealing with some weight, or some stress, then it runs away a little bit. I think that’s an interesting thing to discuss, because your emotional state has a high effect on your habits, which then affects your physicality.
For you, what does that look like? Are you a depressive eater?
Sometimes I will get away from drinking the water that I need to drink. Oftentimes we run around dehydrated, not realizing that we are. Sometimes you won’t carve enough time to prepare the right meals, so you start relying on quicker meals, or even restaurants, but you can’t control what goes in there. So, you’re ingesting a lot of different things that you’re not necessarily aware of as it relates to your physical needs.
I think emotional health is what dictates your physical. It’s a state of mind. When I talk to my fellas who do this on a regular basis—like Corey Calliet, who’s a friend of mine, he’s a trainer, he’s also an actor, but he’s made a big presence in the training world. Every time we talk, he’s like, “Look, prioritizing physical health will help you maintain a better state of mental health.” And there’s a balance there. I think there are different properties to physical health than just looking at one’s physique. There are different effects. It should always be a part of the conversation when people think about why they want to get fit or why they want to eat this way. It’s going to help improve everything mentally, emotionally, spiritually. It will!
Your parents were both in the military, right?
Yeah, both my parents were Marines.
How do you feel like that informed your relationship with health, fitness, and discipline when you were younger?
It informed everything on discipline. I was raised in a single-parent household by my mom, and yeah, discipline was everything. To be on time, you were late. To be early was to be on time. I had to prioritize reputation, decorum, cleanliness, had to hit those chores. We had a disciplined environment growing up. We had to do our best at it. We had to give it our all.
When it comes to physical training and working out, I don’t really think about what I’m doing in the moment. I think about the goal I’m doing it for. That’s what helps you push through a couple of those last reps that hurt like hell. Growth is in the pain, not in the ease. Sometimes you have to switch your brain, discipline your brain to know that when your body starts feeling that strain, or when your body starts feeling weary, you can push further. A disciplined mind is going to help you get there. That’s where your growth really starts.
If you do 10 push-ups and you don’t feel it, you ain’t doing nothing. When you start feeling something, that’s when you start actually doing the work. Your limits are, to a degree, set by your mentality. How disciplined are you going to choose to be? How intentional are you going to choose to be about pushing past those limits to reach your goals?
Coming up in a military household, did you have any interest in joining the military yourself?
Absolutely not. No. No!
My mother was very open with my brother and I about her experience in the military and never wanted the military for us. Granted, we have a great deal of respect for soldiers out there doing their thing. We know what it’s like with the soldiers on the front lines, and it’s scary when you don’t know if they’re going to come back home to their families.
But within that world, there are a great many threats and dangers that my mom and father both faced. There’s some things people talk about, some things people don’t talk about. But yeah, [my mom] was like, “Nah, y’all going to have a different path.”
So, when you decided to pursue the acting path, were you drawn to the physicality of it?
Yes, but from a different point. I wasn’t so much into the physique side of bodybuilding or anything like that as a kid. I came up with martial artists. I watched a lot of martial arts films. So, for me, the physicality came from always wanting to just do fighting films. That was part of my culture growing up.
My mother and father met in Japan. They were stationed over there, and my mom was actively practicing martial arts as part of her daily routine. So it’s been with my brother and I since we were kids. For me, the physicality came from that, from fighting. I still love it.
Then wanting to get stronger, that was always there throughout my childhood, because I had asthma and things like that. I always felt limited physically by my body’s natural defaults, and I wanted to find a way to push past that. I was not a big runner, still not a big runner. Endurance in that space is a big priority.
But physicality has always been there since I was a kid. I only got to the bodybuilding later in life when I was given that green light from a job. I’d always wanted to get bigger, but the jobs I was on were contractual: “We want you to stay this size.” All right. I’d work out and they would literally tell me, “You got to stop working out.”
There was one job where I was playing Brian Banks, an actual former football player who studied the law and exonerated himself of a false charge that he caught. My first real time getting in the gym and going through some heavy bodybuilding stuff was with Brian. I had to put on some size. I was like, “Bro, how did you do it?” That’s where I started learning the foundation of how to build my body. I think I went from 185, 190 [pounds] up to, like, 215 in a couple months.
That’s kind of nuts.
Yeah, it is a lot of weight to put on in a very small amount of time. That’s something you want to stretch out over—not two or three months, [maybe] six months to a year—to put that on gradually. The first thing is massively changing your eating habits. This is probably going to sound stupid, but also I feel like there’s some truth in it. There’s a lot of people who maintain a wonderful physique without actually going to the gym on a regular basis, because of how they eat, and regulate eating habits by paying attention to the sugars and all that kind of stuff. It’ll help you do the work without you having to physically get in there and do some heavy stuff.
Now with Cross, I obviously got to maintain the physique there. So, anytime that I have a job that forces me to maintain the physique, I get happy, because now I have no excuse.
In your career, you’ve been on set with guys like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Tom Cruise, two actors who are known for playing very physical roles. What was it like learning from the masters?
What you learn is there’s a way that they organize and prioritize their lives to maintain the goals. There’s a huge discipline that goes into that.
Tom Cruise is the most energetic person I’ve ever met in my life. He’s got this trailer that’s a traveling gym. That dude would be up in there, I don’t care what time of the morning it is! I don’t know when he sleeps—or if he sleeps—but he’d be up in there getting it. I was training with him in his trailer gym as well.
When we were shooting Reacher 2, some of the core work I realized I had no grasp of. You think, I’m good, I got balance. Then they’re like, “Okay, stand on this ball.” You’re basically balancing yourself while you’re kneeling on a rubber ball, trying not to fall. It put a focus on actually strengthening my core. I realized I didn’t know shit.
But he’s got a great team around, and he motivates. And DJ [Dwayne Johnson] is the same. He puts people in place to maintain the discipline that he knows he needs to reach his goals on a daily basis. That really matters.
Strength ain’t got nothing to do with size. There’s a lot of cats that are little, itty bitty! A lot of times we have lazy muscles because we don’t know how to engage them. Particularly with the glutes, a lot of people will say, “I’m going to do back work. I’m going to do all arms. I might do some squats here and there.” But when you really engage your glutes, that actually helps to support your back. If you know how to do it the right way, then you’re going to increase your maximum potential for results everywhere else. If you don’t know how to engage your glutes on certain exercises, you’re going to fail. Same with the core. If you don’t know how to engage your core in certain exercises, you’re not setting your body up to reach its peak potential because you’re not connecting the dots.
I’ve had back problems. I had two back surgeries. Severe sciatica, herniated discs, all that kind of stuff. I mean, there was one period in my life, I walked around with pain every day for about three years straight. That was off of the sciatica. My mobility is mostly back. I’d say I’m a cool 90% now, but I had to learn how to engage my glutes to support my back. The healing was long, it was slow, it was painful. There’s no quick route to it but consistency. So, core, glutes, those are the oftentimes missed or neglected areas when you’re talking about thinking about getting into the whole body building game. Those are key to doing whatever else you want to do.
What are your favorite things to do in the weight room?
Oh, I’m lazy, man. I will do bench press all day. Now, I quite enjoy just hitting the treadmill. I thought to lose weight, you had to do high-intensity training. You had to do some crazy cardio running this, that, and the other. Nah. All you have to do is get on the treadmill, hit the highest incline you can at a good walking pace—usually around 3.5—and you keep that steady pace for 30 minutes to an hour every day. It’s going to cut your fat but maintain your muscle and your size, so that you can thread the needle of losing the bad weight while gaining and maintaining the big, good weight. It’s a hard thing to do. Usually you have to pick one. Either you’re going to lose weight and slim down, or you’re going to build muscle. But usually trying to do both at the same time is lunacy. Hitting that treadmill on the daily? It does wonders, man. It’s magic.
But yeah, the bench press for me is—I’m chilling, lying down. You know what I mean? It’s also a competitive thing for me, trying to figure out how much I can max out on that daggone bench without breaking my arms. But it’s easy and comfortable, I don’t really feel much of a strain there. Everything else, though? The mobility work is what kills you. Having to stretch. The pre-workout is what whoops my butt, literally just stretching and warming up the muscles.
I like the feeling of a good stretch, though! That good pain.
I like it when I can stretch. Some of us over here old, bro.
Are you up on any wellness stuff? Are you doing yoga, Pilates, acupuncture, anything like that?
I was doing Pilates for a minute. I had just gotten into that because everybody had been telling me about Pilates forever, especially my wife. I got into Pilates late. I still need some discipline there, I ain’t going to lie. But it’s great.
All those muscles that you didn’t know you had, Pilates targets those. This ain’t no game. It is not for the meek! But I love that, because it educates me further on my body’s capabilities and what I actually can achieve. I live on a plane these days, I’ll want to get back into it just to give my body some sense of normalcy and consistency.
Do you cook for yourself, or is that out of the picture now that you’re on the go so much?
I do love to cook, [but] I don’t get to cook often because I am on the go a lot. I grew up cooking in my house. My father is Caribbean and my mom is from the South, so that’s just automatic. My brother and I loved cooking shows growing up. I want to own restaurants. I have four or five different ideas.
But I keep it simple. If I’m on a training regimen, honestly, it’s really down to rice and chicken on a daily basis, or ground turkey, because you can get creative with it. There’s no closing the door on ingredients or flavor when it comes to trying to develop a nice physique for health. But when I’m going for quick, truncated results, I go hard and heavy, cut out the processed sugars and things like that. I start doing the fasting. But that’s when I’m training. When I’m not training, I eat whatever the hell I want to eat!
Right now, it’s cutting back on ramen. Dear Lord, I love ramen. In New York, there’s a spot called Ichiran. God-dang, it’s good. I love food. I be out there getting it. But now I’m trying to feel better mentally and physically. So, it’s back on the waters, it’s back on eating my clean meats, my clean carbs, all that. I love fruit to death. Vegetables, depends.
You mentioned fasting is something you’ll do every now and then. What does that look like for you?
When I’m doing intermittent fasting, I usually won’t eat until about 3 o’clock. if I’m trying to drop weight fast. If I don’t have to be as severe, it’ll usually be around 12 o’clock. The challenge with fasting is you’re not taking in a lot of carbs and your body gets to do more rest, which is great. However, you need to find a way to meet your protein goals on a regular basis. And if you’re eating between 3:00 and whatever time I stop eating—8:00 or 9:00—I got to find a way to pack in that protein.
Usually, people get big and then drop. I’m the kind of person where I like to just cut fat and then build muscle. For me, getting super, super big and then having to cut weight for some reason is harder. I think it’s mentally harder for me than to just keep a smaller frame and go get bigger from there. When you put on massive size and you’re intensely trying to drop that, it’s the cardio. I got to get into a lot of heavy cardio, and it’s just not my favorite thing. I just prefer weightlifting. It’s simpler. If I’m going to cardio, cardio’s going to be fighting. Like I said, I’m good with the treadmill. My basketball knees are gone, bro. They’re dead.
What are your vices?
I actually already mentioned it. Ramen. My vice comes down to carbs for some reason. I used to be a sweet-tooth guy. Now it depends. But my vice is definitely some carbs, man. Pastas, it’s a beautiful thing. But once that gut gets a little wobbly, you’re like, “Hey, bro, it might not be worth it. Those last little bites, you might want to chill.”
I’m trying to think of anything else that is a vice. They got these little candies called Hi-Chews.
Oh, I love Hi-Chews.
It’s a problem. They’re addictive. I’m like, Who the hell? What did you put in this? I’m sure none of it is good for me. I eat it anyway.
In Real-Life Diet, athletes, celebrities, and other high performers talk about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.