The Real-Life Diet of Isaac Powell, Who Can't Turn Down a ‘A Fluffy, Flaky Croissant’

The actor Isaac Powell first became a star on Broadway—in the Tony-winning 2017 revival of Once on This Island and then in Ivo van Hove’s gritty 2020 revival of West Side Story. In the last few years, the actor has broadened his horizons, starring in a Calvin Klein Underwear campaign and stealing scenes on Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story.

Now, he’s appearing in The Franchise, the HBO series created by Succession and Veep writer Jon Brown with Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes. The show satirizes superhero movies with a hilarious glimpse into the behind-the-scenes machinations of those franchises. Imagine a workplace comedy like The Office—except in this case, the workplace is the set of a superhero movie.

Powell plays Bryson, the right-hand man of god-like studio head Shane. Early in the season, Bryson feels like a powerless lackey, sent to do the bidding of the big boss—and routinely undermined by the cast and crew of Tecto: Eye of the Storm, the troubled superhero movie they’re trying to make. But as the season wears on, it turns out Bryson is more integral to the proceedings that he lets on. “We would get the episodes just before we would start to film them,” Powell says. “So I really had no real idea of where we were going. I was just as surprised as I think everybody else will be with what happens episode to episode.”

In the middle of the show's run, GQ caught up with Powell about superhero bodies, growing up with a CrossFit champion father and why he can’t resist “a fluffy, flaky croissant.”

For Real-Life Diet, GQ talks to athletes, celebrities, and other high performers about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.

Isaac Powell: Yeah, I've certainly felt a kind of pressure to maintain a very…pleasing physical form, I guess. I don't know how much of that comes from the industry and how much of that comes from society at large, or how much of it is just my upbringing.

I think given that a lot of my career, I've played characters who were seen through a romantic gaze—I've always played someone's romantic partner. And so I guess there is a little bit of pressure for an actor to feel like they have to look like that sort of ideal of someone who is desired by someone else. So certainly I think I've played a lot of characters who don't wear a lot of clothes, and I've certainly felt some pressure to look good on camera or on stage and just be in the best shape possible. There's definitely a pressure there.

I'll be honest, I don't know. It is candidly, just something I do really struggle with. Body image has always taken up a lot of space in my brain. I also grew up in a family of bodybuilders, I grew up in the gym, and so I've always sort of had this idea of what the ideal male form looks like. I don't really know how I deal with it. I guess I deal with it by just doing the best I can to maintain a... Oh God, it's a great question. I'm wrestling with it as I go. I'm sorry if it's not coming out well. I would say I don't yet know how to deal with it. It's a work in progress, I would say. So I don't have all the answers or all the tools for it.

Yeah, truly. And these images stay in the world forever, and these films, everything, it lasts. It sticks around. So there's a kind of pressure to make sure that what you're putting out into the world is the best that it can be. But yeah, it's really, really tricky.

So, my family owns a gym in my hometown. It's a personal training studio called Powell Fitness Training and Wellness, and it's my dad's company and my mom's as well—my mom really runs it but my dad's kind of the face of the company. My sister, Jessica Powell, is also a professional bodybuilder. Both my dad and sister are both natural bodybuilders. They don't take any enhancement.

My dad really went full-time into fitness when I was quite young. I think I was still in elementary school. Prior to that, he'd owned a landscaping company. And from that point on, if I wasn't at school or at play practice, I was at the gym. So I was just always there. And I think I gleaned a lot about fitness just by being around it so much. And all of our family vacations tended to revolve around where my dad's bodybuilding competitions were in the world. So there was a lot of travel for his competitions or his CrossFit competitions. The first time I ever came to L.A. was for the first time my dad competed in the CrossFit Games and won. So a lot of my early years and adolescence revolved around fitness and sport.

I actually never felt any pressure from my family to be lifting weights or doing anything in the gym. I was always encouraged to just do what I wanted to do, and I really arrived at fitness on my own when I was in college. That was when I really started to work out for myself. And at that point, I had all the tools that I needed to be able to develop sort of a regimen for myself, because I'd learned a lot just growing up around my dad and sister. I sort of arrived at that independently of their relationship to fitness, but it certainly influenced how I approached my own regimen, just simply knowing what to do, knowing how to tailor a fitness regimen to my specific goals and needs.

And same thing with diet and nutrition, I learned a tremendous amount, not because I intended to, but just because I was exposed to it from such a young age. My approach to fitness and to wellness and to nutrition has always been a very intuitive one. I have a lot of information in my head, and because of that, I don't feel like I have to sit down and count out my macros and walk into the gym with a list of exercises. I just have this Rolodex in my brain and this knowledge that I can kind of call upon. So I feel like I approach it more intuitively, less from a strict place of, ‘This is exactly what I do.’ I just kind of pull on this bank of information that I have and I use it as needed.

Yeah, so I was probably a junior in college when I started going to the fitness center on my college's campus, and that was when I really started to take training kind of seriously. I think part of me knew I was about to graduate into an industry that certainly privileges certain kinds of looks and aesthetics. And so I wanted to do everything that I could to look my best. And so I started working out then and taking my nutrition more seriously as well. Up until that point, I was just an absolute fast food junkie. I ate Bojangles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—anyone from the south will know what I'm talking about.

And even though I knew a lot about nutrition, I wasn't really implementing it until I got serious about my own training and nutrition. So I started going to the fitness center on campus at UNCSA [University of North Carolina School of the Arts] and pretty much exclusively doing a lot of hypertrophy work, just trying to build muscle and a lot of mobility stuff too, because I was a dancer and it was important to me that if I was going to gain muscle, I didn't lose any kind of mobility or flexibility. So as much strength training as I would do, I would also balance that out with a lot of mobility and flexibility training too.

Actually, yeah, probably. My family, they split their time between North Carolina and South Carolina. They have a farm down there and my dad just finally got his gym on the farm finished. So they've got CrossFit rigs and lots of equipment down there. And it would not surprise me if I get down there and he and his buddies are doing some kind of a workout or something down there.

I tend to kind of do my own thing even when my family is working out together. I tend to like to do things on my own. I don't really like to work out with other people.

It looks like everybody else's Thanksgiving, I think. My family's always really understood balance as an important part of wellness and fitness. And my dad and my mom also understand the benefit of a cheat day. I think if there ever was an occasion for a cheat day, Thanksgiving is a big one. So our Thanksgiving is also going to have gravy and cornbread and collard greens with bacon in them and chitlins and everything else.

Lots of cakes.

If I'm doing a show where I'm singing a lot, I am avoiding dairy, I'm avoiding sugar, I'm avoiding anything that's going to cause me to create excess mucus. I'm also trying to eat things for energy because it requires so much more energy. So I don't want to eat anything that's going to spike my blood sugar levels right before a show. I want to keep things really consistent. I’m eating complex carbs and a lot of protein—things that are really nutrient dense and less of the breads and sweets and things that I like to eat when I'm not working.

In terms of the fitness routine, I tend to do quite a bit more cardio because I just want to get my blood pumping and moving really well before I do a show.

Oh my God, yeah. Do I have a sweet tooth? This morning I had a cinnamon roll, a huge cinnamon roll with my coffee. I love sweets.

I would say pastries. Pastries are a huge weakness for me. I have a hard time turning down just a fluffy, flaky croissant or a cinnamon roll or anything like that.

I don't really like the idea of offsetting. I feel like that can get kind of tricky if it's a tit-for-tat kind of thing. I never like anything that feels punitive when it comes to health or wellness or fitness. So if I eat something "bad,” I don't feel like I'm going to go for a run to try to offset it or to balance it out. Because I trust myself, that my exercise and nutrition is good enough 90 percent of the time to withstand having a strawberry shortcake and a pizza one night—I'm just saying that because that's what we had for dinner last night, we made pizzas with our friends here, and we had strawberry shortcake for dessert.

But every other night of the week, I'm eating chicken breasts with kale and brown rice. That's my go-to. I eat that most nights of the week because a.) I think it's delicious and I enjoy it and b.) it's good for me, it just makes me feel good.

Interesting question. I have noticed that my body's a lot stiffer than it used to be. Maybe five years ago, I could just take off running and not think twice about it, but now I need to roll out my ankles and my knees before I take off running, and I need to stretch before I do certain lifts. And I would say in my mobility in particular, in my joints, it requires more effort than it used to. And I'm certainly carrying weight in places where I didn't use to when I was younger. So yeah, I would say I'm having to focus a lot more on my mobility exercises, specifically around my joints than maybe I had to previously.

I would say another difference between my body at 30 versus my body at maybe 21—I can no longer really tolerate making myself feel bad just for the short-term pleasure of something tasting good. I used to really not care so much, I would just eat myself sick just because I enjoyed the experience or the high that I would get from a certain kind of sweet treat or something. But now, I think twice before I eat something, not because I'm afraid of how I'm going to look if I eat it, but because of how I'm going to feel. I just want to wake up feeling good. And I know I might not do that if every night of the week I'm treating myself.