Thinking Big

Posted by Greg

November 8, 2007

Big Chilli Magazine, March 2006
I’ve always been a big guy, which has mostly been a good thing. No one ever wanted to kick my ass in school (or if they did, they never tried), and I usually get the front seat when a taxi is hailed. At 187cm and 112kg, you can imagine that living in Thailand only compounds the situation; I look comically out of place on a motorcycle taxi and I’ve lost count of how many times someone in a line has turned around a smashed their face into my chest. But after I met Conan Stevens, the problems I have with size don’t seem so, well, big anymore. In fact, they feel downright puny.

At 210cm and 135kg (that’s 7 feet and 297 lbs for those unskilled in metric), the soft-spoken Stevens is easy to spot around Bangkok and one guy who not only stands out in a crowd - he defines it. Born in Newcastle, Australia, he grew up in the Bondi Beach area of Sydney, where he always remembers being bigger than everyone else. “When I was 16, some friends and I were inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger to start working out. I was a long distance runner before that, so I was a bit thin, but after six months, I was bigger than most of the jocks at my school.”

After spending some time in the Army Reserve and emerging from the University of Newcastle with a degree in economics (”and a bachelor’s degree in inebriation - with honours”), he realized that life behind a desk probably wasn’t the best choice. “I liked it for a while, because it was low stress and I got to go home at the same time everyday. If something didn’t go to plan, well tough luck - I was just doing my job.” But when he started to get noticed for his size, things changed dramatically. “I took a week off to film a Pepsi commercial in India, which my boss didn’t like. It was funny watching these fools try and fire me without actually saying it, because they were too scared. I guess they didn’t realize that I’d given them my notice the day before.”

His next job in show business would prove to be a memorable one. “I got a job with the Sydney Dance Company,” he tells me. “Graeme Murphy, the owner, met me at a Sydney pub one night and offered me to come in for an audition, and the next thing I knew I was dancing in Australia’s premiere dance troupe. It was actually a modern dance production, but nearly everyone was classically trained in ballet. We ended up doing six return seasons at the Sydney Opera House over three years, and the music score even went platinum.”

After a while, the inevitable wrestling audition reared its head, and Stevens found himself punching, pummeling, kicking and throwing guys across a mat. “I really enjoyed working the crowd, and getting up there and putting on a spontaneous show,” he elaborates. “To get a crowd yelling at you or cheering for you is the mark of a good wrestler, and it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, after my team-mate and I won the Australian Tag-Team championship, a severe nerve injury forced me out, which took almost five full years to heal.”

When a friend called him up from Thailand, he took the plunge and moved into the tropics. “I was having a bad experience with a business partner, when my friend told me they were looking for big foreigners to act in Thai films,” he explains. “That was when I just decided it was a good time to sell my stuff and go back to my acting dream. Australia has a very small US dominated local market, with maybe two or three US films a year shot there; very little to do in the way of acting.”

After the move, Stevens felt right at home in Thailand, with the tropical heat, cheap beer and beaches close by, but given the smaller stature of many Asian people, I wondered how it felt being even more conspicuous here than he was at home. “Many people in Australia wanted to fight me to try to prove themselves. It got to the point that nearly every single time I went out, I would have at least one person try to start a fight with me,” he says. “It became very boring very quickly.” His size certainly causes him to get noticed more often here, but it’s not so big a problem as it was back home. “The Thais are great, the working class people are a ton of fun. If I walk past a construction site, for example, I get thumbs up and calls of ‘big man, good, good!’ The girls who aren’t scared are curious and are easy to talk with; people are generally much friendlier and much nicer here.”

The kicker with Stevens isn’t that he’s tall (there are plenty of tall foreigners in Bangkok), but that he’s also built like Jean Claude Van Damme. The first question that comes to mind is how much a guy his size eats and how many times he can lift me over his head with one arm. “You are what you eat, it’s totally true,” he says. “I eat eight or nine times a day, decent servings of meat or eggs and boiled rice for 90% of my meals. This is the most important part of being big - regular good food.” The workout regimen is also important. “I work out about an hour every day, powerlifting-type exercises. I’ve toned it down a bit though; I used to be huge, 148kg at my biggest.”

Despite the kick he gets out of people noticing him, it does get tiring. “Sometimes I just have enough and I’ll stay home all day, reading, working on my computer, relaxing.” He also explains that he loves dispelling stereotypes about big people. “Many people used to think that because I’m big, I must be stupid,” says Stevens. “It got annoying, so I went out and signed up for MENSA, where your IQ must be in the top 2% of the population to join, just to show people they were wrong.” The typical laid-back Aussie attitude serves him well.

As for the future, Stevens sees big things happening. “Things are going really well now that I’ve left Australia. I’m getting regular work and this year has some rather exciting prospects coming up,” he says. “Nothing is solid yet, but I’m hoping to split my time between Europe and Thailand - I’m a big guy but I don’t think I could handle a real winter with real snow and cold.”

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