By ALEX FRENCHFEB. 28, 2014  When the screenwriter David Hayter conceived the idea for “Wolves,” his directorial debut, he wanted to make a coming-of-age drama that he describes as “ ‘Twilight’ with a bit more bite to it — and without abstinence.” His script focused on a high-school football-star-slash-werewolf who skips town after his parents are gruesomely murdered and eventually comes to blows with a man-eating alpha dog. Hayter just needed to find the perfect young werewolf, and he settled on a relatively unknown actor named Lucas Till as the lead. “I thought of Lucas because I felt this movie was about a kid on the verge of adulthood,” said Hayter, who also wrote the screenplays for “Watchmen” and “X-Men.” “And this is the story that takes him over the brink.”  At the time, Till hoped he was on the brink of something else. At 5-foot-10 and 145 pounds, he carried little physical resemblance to a guy capable of beating up a man-eating alpha dog, or even making a high-school football team. The Texas native, then 22, had a rangy build and a James Van Der Beek look; he played Miley Cyrus’s ranch hand in “Hannah Montana: The Movie” and then a college poet in Jackie Chan’s “The Spy Next Door.” The films made good use of what Hayter says is Till’s greatest gift: “that face — he looks like an angel.” Tom Sullivan, Till’s manager, told me, “He’s got the best chin in Hollywood.”  ‘Almost any actor, even some of Hollywood’s most scrawny, can be physically transformed for the part if he’s willing to put in the hard work. The studios know this, which is why any inexpensive unknown can be chosen.’  Not long ago, Till might have looked forward to a promising career in romantic comedies, but instead he is an aspiring action star. He has to be. The six major studios are releasing about 30 percent fewer movies than they did seven years ago, and they have largely narrowed their focus to expensive concept projects or franchises based on existing intellectual property — comic books, young-adult novels, older movies — that can be rebooted and sold to passionate pre-existing audiences around the world. Because the American movie market now makes up less than a third of global box-office receipts, studios tend to favor projects featuring explosions, car chases and doomsday scenarios — a universal language of violence that translates easily in China, India, Brazil and Europe. Almost without exception, the movies star some beefcake with pecs that make Ben-Hur’s seem puny. In the last three years, the top-grossing movies have included Marvel’s “The Avengers”; “The Hunger Games” and its sequel; “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”; “Thor”; and even “Fast & Furious 6.” What used to be summer blockbusters are now anchoring box offices year round.  Once upon a time, a movie poster needed to have only two words on it: the star’s last name and the title. Stallone: Rambo. Schwarzenegger: Terminator. In the new action-hero economy, though, actors rarely carry the franchise; more often, the franchise carries the actor. Chris Hemsworth was little known before “Thor,” and no one outside the industry was too familiar with Henry Cavill before “Man of Steel.” Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who produced “Transformers” and this winter’s “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” told me that studios were gambling on unproven actors for economic reasons. “These movies cost a lot to mount. Adding on the big movie star’s salary is the thing that makes you go, ‘Boy, I don’t know if I can afford it.’ ” Perhaps no movie typifies this model better than the 2006 mega-hit “300,” an adaptation of Frank Miller’s popular comic-book series, which featured inexpensive and little-known actors like Gerard Butler and Michael Fassbender and then catapulted them to stardom. This week, the film’s producers are trying to replicate that success with a sequel, “300: Rise of an Empire,” which is anchored by the unheralded Sullivan Stapleton and 299 other equally fit, anonymous men in leather skirts.  There are now more indistinguishable, barrel-chested, eight-packed aspiring stars than ever, and they’re all hoping to become the next Hems­worth or Cavill. Nikki Finke, the former editor of Deadline.com, describes the modern casting process as a “bake-off.” “They’re looking at seven actors. You’ve heard of two of them. . . . They all have names like Joe and Josh. It’s impossible to keep them straight.” The longtime action-movie producer Avi Lerner said: “Every day I get phone calls from two or three agents in big Hollywood agencies. They’re always telling me about some new client that is going to be the next Tom Cruise. One in a hundred becomes a movie star.” And the competition is only getting tougher. “There’s going to be an implosion,” Steven Spielberg warned last spring at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, “where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.” By the summer, that crash already seemed to be happening: “R.I.P.D.” and “Turbo” bombed, joining other megabudget flops like “After Earth,” “White House Down” and “Pacific Rim.” “The Lone Ranger,” for which Disney paid an estimated $375 million, made less than $261 million worldwide. “Eight years ago, there were roughly 150 wide-release movies,” says Mark Gill, the president of Millennium Films. “Last year, there were 115. My prediction is that it will be down to 50 in the next couple years. And there will be fewer tent poles.”  Till wasn’t nervous about this ominous trend, he told me one afternoon outside Hal’s Bar & Grill in Venice Beach. He’d already played Havok, a plasma-shooting mutant in the “X-Men” franchise. “Wolves,” he hoped, would be his ticket to stardom. The movie had a multimillion-dollar budget that he thought would attract notice from studios and get them to see his leading-man potential. He was ready. Before shooting the film, he experimented with something called hypertrophic training, which builds muscles through various methods, including straining them for extended periods. He sucked down post-workout whey protein shakes, swallowed Omega-3 capsules and ate a protein gelatin product designed for cancer patients. He put on 10 pounds in two months. Now he wanted to take advantage of his more distinct assets — that face, that chin. “Growing up, I’d watch ‘Rambo’ or ‘Commando,’ and so many action heroes were these huge guys with six-pack abs. It almost became a novelty,” he said, then added a bit of wishful thinking: “Not everybody’s got to be like that. I want to be relatable. I want to be the guy that people root for.”  Action movies tend to reflect their eras. In the early ’80s, the genre was populated by monolithic figures — Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren — who movie scholars have argued were reactions to Cold War neuroses or feminism. By the end of the decade, as unions were broken, blue-collar skills were replaced by machines and Wall Street pulled away from the mainstream, Hollywood championed the underdog. Bruce Willis’s slender John McClane, the protagonist in the “Die Hard” movies, has been described as the first action hero who might lose. (Though, of course, he didn’t.)  The rise of the Everyman made way for an era of unlikely action heroes, like Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, who thwarted their enemies more with their attitude than with their brute strength. These stars could also command inflated salaries, often $20 million up front and then 15 percent or 20 percent of the film’s gross profits. But studios, hoping to increase their profits, wanted to curtail that. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios at the time, circulated a memo in 1991 about eschewing a “blockbuster mentality” and wresting control back from the highest-paid talent. It took almost a decade, but by the start of the 2000s, it was understood that virtually every actor in a franchise could be replaced with someone cheaper. Edward Norton was replaced as the Hulk. When Terrence Howard wanted more money for “Iron Man 2,” the studio gave his role to Don Cheadle; it also reportedly lowballed Mickey Rourke and Samuel L. Jackson.  Till’s co-star in “Wolves,” Jason Momoa (the man-eating alpha dog), learned about this disposability firsthand. For years, a reboot of the “Conan” franchise had been in the works, possibly starring Schwarzenegger as the aging savage. But when Avi Lerner’s Nu Image Films decided on the revival, in 2008, Lerner and his partners opted to go with an unknown, which would be much cheaper. “Everybody knows I’m a money man,” Lerner told me. “I’m not out to win an Oscar. If I spend $60 million on a movie, I want to make a 20 or 30 percent return.” The “Conan” bake-off reportedly included a not-yet-famous Chris Hemsworth and other relative unknowns, like Kellan Lutz, Jared Padalecki of the TV series “Supernatural” and Momoa, who is best known as the warrior Khal Drogo in HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”  When the producers finally settled on Momoa in 2010, he threw himself into the role, embarking on an intensive six-week training regimen, working out six hours a day — including two hours of samurai sword practice. He ate a boiled chicken breast every two hours or so, roughly 56 per week, and packed on an additional 30 pounds of muscle to his already brawny frame. A few months before the film opened, in 2011, the trade show ­CinemaCon presented Momoa with its Rising Star award. During the lead-up to the movie, Momoa told reporters that a sequel was in the works and that this time around he was involved with the writing process.  But “Conan” suffered a dismal opening weekend, earning only $10.5 million domestically. “I let myself cry for a day, then I moved on to the next one,” Lerner said. “We make more than a dozen of these things a year. We don’t stop.” Another high-powered executive, who asked not to be identified, noted a deeper problem. “No one cared. It’s a comic book that existed 40 or 50 years ago.” Nonetheless, Paradox Entertainment, the company that owns the rights to “Conan,” announced in October that it was leasing them to Universal for yet another version. Momoa took the job as a man-eating alpha dog and pledged to start over.  Three months after Till finished working on “Wolves” last April, I met him for lunch at a Mexican restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. He seemed agitated. “Wolves” didn’t have a distributor yet. Shooting for the next “X-Men” movie had already begun in Montreal, and the director, Bryan Singer, had yet to announce Till’s involvement. As he sipped his second margarita, Till told me that a number of his cast mates had been written out of the sequel. There was speculation on fan blogs and celebrity-news websites that he might be out, too. Till knew the cautionary tales about Terrence Howard and Mickey Rourke; he’d seen Momoa struggle. According to reports, Chris Hemsworth made a pittance for “Thor” and received a pay increase of only $500,000 for the sequel.  A few years ago, Till said, he was so frustrated with the industry that he starred in an independent movie, “All Superheroes Must Die,” which his roommate wrote and directed and Till helped finance with $20,000 of his own money. It had a limited release in 2013 and then found its way into stores. Till had recently sold the international rights, which allowed him to pay his rent for a couple of years without worrying, he said. Margarita No. 3 arrived. “I’m really worried about disposability,” he finally offered. “I’m fighting for my life. I feel like I’m up against the ropes.”  The action-hero industry may have evolved from its roots in the ’70s and ’80s, but its center of gravity remains largely at Gold’s Gym in Venice. Mark Wahlberg has been going for years, as have Dwayne Johnson, Chris Hemsworth and a number of producers, directors and studio heads. Mike Ryan, one of the gym’s trainers, recounted a day years ago when he spotted Robert Downey Jr. and Jon Favreau chatting in a corner. Days later, Ryan spotted Downey shopping for issues of “Iron Man” at a local comic-book shop. He wasn’t completely surprised when Downey was cast as the lead.  On a Thursday early last August, Carl Weathers was reading The Los Angeles Times on a recumbent bike, while Mickey Rourke, in a gray stocking cap and a stained undershirt, was kibitzing with Rico McClinton, a charismatic former heavyweight bodybuilding champion with screen time in “Battleship” and HBO’s “True Blood.” Rourke and McClinton were also talking to Guy Grundy, a two-time Mr. Australia, who is trying to start an acting career at 43.  Grundy is a throwback to the days when action stars came with their own real-life back stories, like Steven Seagal claiming to have worked for the C.I.A. After retiring from bodybuilding, Grundy got involved in underground fighting and eventually channeled his rage into a lucrative career as what he calls a “debt collector.” After he was arrested on burglary charges in 2011, he was scared straight by the possibility that he might spend years behind bars, away from his daughter. “I’ve paid my dues,” he said. “I’ve done the bad-guy thing, and I’m waiting for my big role.”  Grundy has appeared as a corrections officer in Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” and as a gladiator on Spike TV’s “Deadliest Warrior.” Of late, he has been landing meatier roles in small movies — as a thug in the Jon Lovitz flick “Sharkproof” and again as a bad guy in an indie action film, “The Lackey.” “I get villains and henchmen,” he told me cheerfully. “It’s such a competitive business. It’s like politics — you’re never really comfortable with where you are. I’m constantly questioning myself. All I can do is my best, but is my best good enough?”  A few feet away, Julien Greaux, 36, closed his eyes and recited a secret mantra before attacking another set of superheavy seated rows. Greaux was determined to be Jason Statham’s replacement in Luc Besson’s reboot of the “Transporter” franchise. About a year ago, Greaux went to see Besson speak at a panel in Santa Monica. After the event, Greaux arranged to meet the director, who, according to Greaux, said he’d be willing to give him a job; Besson needed to see him on film, though, first.  ‘He’s just turning 16. He’s almost 6 feet tall, and he’s got an eight-pack. He’s a thicker Keanu Reeves. The sky’s the limit for him.’  The problem was that Greaux, who earns his living as a fitness model, has never appeared in a movie. “I decided to take a different route to stardom,” he told me in his thick-accented French. “I wanted to make a name for myself before I began acting.” Instead of slapping together a sizzle reel, Greaux secured a $20,000 grant from the French government and filmed a 20-minute short called “Parabellum.” In it, he stars as an infamous French bank robber who tries to quit that life and make an honest living as a cabdriver in L.A. It took him a year to make. The film was being edited by a friend in Paris, and Greaux hoped to soon have the finished version to show Besson.  Hollywood has gotten creative in its hunt for the next big action star. Producers have considered scouting high-school football games. Brett Norensberg, an agent at Gersh, decided to structure a significant part of his practice around recruiting mixed-martial-arts fighters, professional wrestlers and martial artists. His list includes a karate whiz named Leo Howard, the star of Disney XD’s “Kickin’ It.” “He’s just turning 16. He’s almost 6 feet tall, and he’s got an eight-pack. He’s a thicker Keanu Reeves. The sky’s the limit for him.”  These efforts, though, belie a truth about action heroes: Almost any actor, even some of Hollywood’s most scrawny, can be physically transformed for the part if he’s willing to put in the hard work. The studios know this, which is why any inexpensive unknown can be chosen. The cast for “300,” including a post-“Phantom of the Opera” Butler and the relative newcomer Fassbender, were put on a brutal program with Mark Twight, a trainer whose workouts incorporated medicine balls, kettlebells and rings to emphasize the athleticism of the Spartans. “I would argue that [director] Zack [Snyder] has changed the way that action movies are made,” Twight told me. “In the past, there was a lot of doubling of the actors because they weren’t athletic themselves. With ‘300,’ Zack wanted to make the actors as physically capable as possible so that there would be the absolute minimum of doubling.”  For last summer’s megahit “Man of Steel,” Snyder sent Cavill to work out with Twight. “I wanted Henry to be the personification of physicality,” Snyder told me. Cavill and Twight worked together for five months before production started and continued training during the six months of filming. Twight packed the pounds onto Cavill’s 6-foot-1 frame by putting him on a 5,000-calorie-a-day diet. Leading up to Cavill’s two shirtless sequences — a few days at the beginning of October 2011 and about six days at the end of that month — Twight scaled Cavill’s caloric intake back to about 2,800 calories. According to Twight, the pressure on Cavill was intense: “Henry was not a well-known guy, and he had chosen to be one of greatest comic-book icons ever. You’re not going to give that guy an inch.”  A number of trainers and actors told me that steroids were out there and that everybody had a good idea of who was on them — though nobody is willing to name names. But as trainers like Twight make obvious, the Hollywood fitness mechanism is brutal and advanced enough to make any performance-enhancing drug seem primitive by comparison. “Post-‘300,’ there is a machine in place — it doesn’t work for everyone, though,” Twight said. “Not everybody can handle the training.” I wondered aloud if this system could, paradoxically, open up contenders to even more competition. Twight bristled. “Arguing that process leads to disposability is a tough sell for me. Not everybody that gets brought into this process comes out the other side living up to their potential. You make yourself disposable by your actions. If you come in and you’re complaining about having to train or having to eat, then nobody has to work with you anymore.”  By the end of last year, after the rounds of hypertrophic training, things were starting to look up for Till. He flew to Montreal last summer to reprise his role as Havok in “X-Men: Days of Future Past.” While Till was on set, Sullivan, his manager, was on the hunt for his next role. There was a western, a rock ’n’ roll biopic, a biblical thriller, a flick about a rich kid who saves his boarding school from terrorists. In mid-July, Sullivan hinted that Till might be in line for a role in the “Expendables” franchise. The holdup, according to Sullivan, was that Sylvester Stallone wasn’t sure Till was macho enough for the role. Sullivan sent a highlight reel of Till’s stunt fights and a video of him shooting targets at a range. Sullivan drove to Comic-Con in San Diego in the middle of the night and slept in a hotel lobby to persuade David Hayter to send fight scenes from the unreleased “Wolves” to Stallone’s people. He even offered to put Till in the ring with Stallone.  The fight never came to fruition, and Till was not cast in the movie, but it turns out that he may not need that break. He was approached about an endorsement deal with a deodorant company, and he was the lead candidate for the starring role in Paramount’s “Monster Trucks.” He was even approached about a sequel to his “All Superheroes Must Die.” And in mid-January, after months of waiting, a new company called Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights to “Wolves.” It is scheduled to be released this year. Till was finally going to get his chance to be carried by a movie. To celebrate, Sullivan pulled his phone from his pocket and showed me a recent video of Till in a white T-shirt grunting and sweating through a set of seated rows. Till was thicker than he was the last time I saw him. He now resembled one of those six-pack hunks that he had told me he wished to distinguish himself from.  Of course, in the zero-sum game of Hollywood action stars, Till’s success narrowed his competitors’ chances. In December, Grundy realized that the film he had hoped to shoot for six months was dead. (His consolation was that he was cast in the sequel to “The Lackey.”) Greaux, meanwhile, was still waiting for a finished version of his movie and seemed to be growing impatient, maybe even desperate, to get it out in the world. It would be too late for Besson, who in mid-February announced that his company was rebooting the “Transporter” franchise with an unknown named Ed Skrein. I broke the news to Greaux the next day. He was confused, shocked and temporarily crestfallen. Then, after taking a moment to regroup, he said: “Everything happens for a reason. I’m not even worried about it. That guy’s got nothing on me.”  Momoa, at least, seemed to have caught a bit of a break. He was cast as the lead in “The Red Road,” a Sundance Channel drama about a sheriff fighting to keep his family together while policing two warring communities, and he had plans to start shooting his own film, a period piece about a 19th-century Hawaiian outlaw. Of course, it wasn’t the career he expected back when he was filming “Conan,” but he seemed unfazed. “Sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn’t, but I’m not going anywhere,” he said, insisting, “I’m not a dime a dozen.”  Seeing those actors on the ropes, so to speak, reminded me of some advice Hayter had given to Till: “I told him to watch a lot of Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson movies before we started filming,” Hayter told me. “They’re so compelling because of the kind of beating they can take. It’s not how hard Harrison Ford can punch that makes him great; it’s when he gets hit so hard that his knees buckle and he just keeps going. It’s that blend of iron-jawed heroism with human vulnerability, his woundability. ‘Wolves’ has got to be a story about a kid who pulls through.” That was beginning to sound like valuable career advice.  Correction: February 28, 2014 An earlier version of an illustration with this article reversed the portraits of Alexander Ludwig and Lucas Till.  Correction: February 28, 2014 An earlier version of this article misidentified the Hollywood studio for the forthcoming movie "Monster Trucks." It is Paramount, not Universal.  Alex French is a journalist whose work has appeared in GQ and New York and on public radio’s “This American Life.” He teaches writing at N.Y.U.  A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2014, on page MM32 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Last, Disposable Action Hero. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
Inside the gym culture of West L.A., where the competition is fierce, the regimens are grueling and everyone is waiting for a call from his agent.