Before Clavicular, before Androgenic, before the Tate brothers, before bonesmashing and frame-mogging and the manosphere and looksmaxxing entered the online lexicon, there was Tony Huge.
A 44-year-old former model turned lawyer turned bodybuilder turned supplement impresario, Huge fled the United States for Thailand to escape legal pressure on his company from the Food and Drug Administration and to build out a “harem” of young, nubile Thai women. With his bulky frame, his sex-and-drugs-fueled lifestyle, and his motto “a day natty [natural] is a day wasted,” Huge became an icon for what was then the fledgling biohacking community. He amassed a huge following of disaffected, lonely young men, some of whom moved to Thailand to live with him. Then, some of them started dying.
Huge is one of the main focuses of Get Huge: Looksmaxxing to Death, a bone-chilling documentary series hitting Hulu on November 10. Directed by Stacey Lee and executive-produced by the journalist Jennings Brown, Get Huge kicks off with the untimely death of “Leo and Longevity,” aka Laith Abdallah Algaz, a biohacker and penis enlargement influencer who was found deceased in Huge’s home in January 2023.
What follows, however, is not a typical true-crime documentary. It’s a dizzying investigation into the hedonistic, self-destructive, and often deadly world of self-optimization, in which dudes inject themselves with pig’s brains and liquified gold, alliances shift at the drop of a hat, and you’re only as good as your last high-performing Instagram Reel. (A warning, spoilers for Get Huge follow.)
Since 2023, Huge has opened up his Pattaya, Thailand, home to the Get Huge team, offering “full transparency” into what Lee refers to as “this 24/7 performance of being a man.”
“It was, ‘Here’s my harem, here’s my other men that I’m leading, here’s my muscles, here’s my drugs,’” she says. But as her crew got further and further into the filmmaking process, it became clear that what was going on behind the scenes—not just the turmoil within Huge’s inner circle but also the hangers-on dropping like flies around him—was far more interesting.
“Therein lies the problem for the young kid watching at home who is watching this as a blueprint for their life. They can’t discern what’s real and what’s not,” Lee says. “Even I was having trouble discerning what was real and what’s not.”