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.”
In some respects, Get Huge is about the rise of looksmaxxing, the wildly popular and dangerous online self-optimization movement popularized by manosphere influencers such as Clavicular and Androgenic. (The filmmakers say Clavicular participated in initial talks with the producers to participate in the documentary but ultimately declined; Androgenic plays a small but key role in the series.)
Tony Huge in the new docuseries, Get Huge.
Courtesy of HuluBut T. Jennings Brown, a journalist and podcast producer, started delving into Huge’s world in 2023, long before Clav became a household name. Brown and his producing partner, Brett Neitchin, were obsessed with the manosphere and how the internet has ushered in extreme and rigid views of masculinity. “I went to school in Kansas and was short and felt insecure about that and always thought someday I’d save up for leg extensions,” he said. “So I’ve always had a horrified fascination with this world.”
Lee came on board as director a year later, just as the manosphere was starting to become a major talking point with the 2024 election. “It was such an absurd story—I mean, a penis influencer dying in Thailand,” she says. “But what was really interesting beyond the subject matter was the deeper story—why are men going to Thailand, and why is this kind of masculinity becoming more and more prevalent in online spaces?”
In some respects, Get Huge is a relatively straightforward true-crime story. Algaz was found deceased in Huge’s home with his pants around his ankles in January 2023, and Thai police ultimately concluded he died of blunt force head trauma. (The case is still open.) Internet sleuths in the looksmaxxing community immediately started pointing fingers at Huge, who had also been linked to two other prominent looksmaxxers, Nick Weisser and Josh Brooks, who died under equally mysterious circumstances in 2018 and 2021, respectively.
But as the filmmakers delved deeper into Huge’s world, they realized that was not the appropriate tack. “True crime became a vehicle through which to actually explore and understand this world, the stakes of it, the responsibilities of it, what keeps men there after these tragedies happen,” Lee says. “We wanted to know not only what draws them in but what keeps them there.” (That was particularly true for Algaz, who had recently abandoned his wife and child in Los Angeles before coming to live with Huge in Thailand.)
In some ways, the question of what keeps Huge’s acolytes in Thailand is the driving force of the series, particularly after the bodybuilder and influencer Connor Murphy (who one of the men in Huge’s circle refers to as “the ultimate chad”) joins the inner circle. As the men resort to increasingly extreme looksmaxxing methods, with Hughes even undergoing a psychotic break as a result of his drug use, they remain entrenched in Huge’s circle until Huge essentially decides to cast them out.
Huge did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the documentary.
Tony Huge.
Courtesy of HuluThough the men frequently cite the importance of male friendship in their lives, they are constantly bickering and enabling each other, filming themselves engaging in increasingly self-destructive behavior to increase their viewership. “They don’t take care of each other,” one of Hughes’ former acolytes, Elon Muscular, says in Get Huge. “They don’t uplift each other. They find ways to fucking fuck each others’ lives up with bad habits.”
There’s also, it must be said, an obvious strain of queerness throughout the series, with the men regularly taking copious amounts of drugs before having group sex with each other and a bevy of Thai sex workers, who Huge calls his “harem.”
“Bodyhacking and looksmaxxing have a very homoerotic side,” says Lee. “It’s a bunch of dudes oiled up, posing with each other in little Speedos, and many of the drugs that began circulating within the community came from gay culture. [And] I think there is a lot of closeted behavior and tendencies to be explored.”
Huge uses his “harem” to burnish his macho image, tattooing his name on one and paying for another’s breast implants. In one shocking scene, he shoots some members of the harem up with drugs to increase their sexual attraction to him. Huge is clear throughout that he is paying these women for their time, raising uncomfortable ethical questions for the audience and the filmmakers alike.
“As a woman, it was incredibly challenging to witness” the way Huge treats his girlfriends, says Lee. “I think he would rationalize what he's doing is giving these women the best versions of their lives. Same with the men—he finds them at rock bottom, and he thinks he can improve them with his chemical fixes.”
One of the most shocking moments of the series, however, happened after the crew had stopped shooting in Pattaya, when Murphy was found dead in a lake in his backyard in July 2026. Murphy had been engaging in increasingly erratic behavior, with Thai media outlets reporting that two syringes and unidentified pills were found in his vehicle after he died, and according to Get Huge, he had recently started shooting up liquid gold. Authorities attributed his cause of death to accidental drowning.
To the team behind Get Huge, however, Murphy was one more casualty associated with an increasingly dangerous movement, as well as yet another loss in Huge’s inner circle. “I think we’ve always had this feeling that this extreme form of masculinity they all believe in was a huge contributing factor” to the deaths, Lee says. In one eerie scene, Huge appears to foreshadow Murphy’s death, addressing critiques that he may be enabling his drug use by callously saying, “It’s not the end of the world if something bad happens. People also learn from that.”
Perhaps more haunting than Murphy’s death after the cameras stopped rolling, however, is that looksmaxxing has only become more popular since Get Huge started filming.
Since production wrapped four weeks before Murphy’s death, Clavicular’s public profile has only grown, with the 20-year-old influencer garnering headlines for his “Camp Looksmax” workshop and walking in a major New York Fashion Week show. The Hulu team was even hit with a cease-and-desist from Clavicular after Mitchell Jackson, Clavicular’s publicist, says they attempted to get footage from the Elena Velez fashion show without his consent, leading to him withdrawing from the project.
“Hulu needs Clavicular. Clavicular doesn’t need Hulu,” Jackson tells WIRED. “That’s why they’re using his name to promote their stupid documentary.” (Brown, who was present, refutes this, saying he was not there to film and was only attending the fashion show in a personal capacity.)
Even as Huge gets older and his audience share is dwarfed by those of the younger generation of looksmaxxers—“relevancy is everything in this world, and looksmaxxing is a young man’s game,” says Lee—the movement he has spawned continues to gain traction. The deaths of Murphy and Algaz have served as little deterrent.
“No one starts out wanting to become one of these extreme characters, and I think there’s something we can all relate to about just trying to be the best version of yourself that you can be,” says Lee. “[But] when Leo died, did anybody stop? When Connor died, did anyone stop? And I think that for me, the question is, when the goalposts keep shifting and the nihilism and the looksmaxxing and the living for today becomes more and more extreme, where does it end?”
