Kumail Nanjiani has always been a nerd and he will always be a nerd. Only these days, he’s an insanely buff nerd who is fulfilling his dream of being a Marvel superhero and romantic leading man. Kumail is the first south Asian man to ever cover Men’s Health, and they really went all out on the photoshoot – he mimics Wolverine, John McClane from Die Hard, Maverick fromTop Gun, and Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Famously buff men. I have to give it to Kumail, he’s not doing the “rah, rah, I’m so inspo and perfect now” thing. He talks about how hard it was to get into all of the gym work, and how he feels like he’s developed body dysmorphia now. He also talks about how he doesn’t want to give up his shredded body now – you can read the full Men’s Health piece here. Some highlights:

His workout motto became “Chase the pain”: “I had to change my relationship to pain. You’re so designed to avoid it, but in that situation you really have to be okay with it. You have to want it. It’s almost trying to rewire your brain.”

He only became an actor in his 30s: “I’d always thought the writers do the real work and the actors are just saying the words. I was very confident in my stand-up, but I didn’t feel confident acting. I was like, ‘This is very difficult, and I want to learn more.’ ” He moved to LA and began taking acting classes. “It was like therapy. I’d trained myself to not feel emotions, to push them away, because emotions are scary. And as soon as I started taking acting classes, I started crying at movies and commercials more. All these emotions I’d learned to suppress, I was now learning to get in touch with. It made my life better, made my anxiety better.”

He dreamt of playing a Marvel superhero: “It was a pipe dream. But I was very strategic about it.” He turned down supporting parts in other comic-book projects, worried they’d take him out of the running for his own big role. And he made it clear that he didn’t want to play some tech-loving sidekick. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be just part of a Marvel movie; I want to be a Marvel superhero.’ ”

His diet: When The Eternals began filming, he met with a studio chef, who grilled him on his food preferences; soon Nanjiani was being delivered five meals a day, including on weekends, all of it carefully planned out. “They were like, ‘If you’re going to have a can of Coke today, let us know in the morning so we can adjust and account for it,’ ” he says. Nanjiani usually had the same breakfast—steak and eggs, or eggs and chicken—but for six months, he never repeated the other meals. And while he was encouraged to eat what he wanted on weekends, he had so successfully cut out such hazards as added sugar and gluten that when he went crazy one night with some sticky toffee pudding, he felt it the next day. “Just 12 hours of physical pain,” he says.

Electric shocks!?!? He’d gone from being a dutiful gym rat to having electric shocks administered to his biceps in order to build more muscle. “I realized, if this is what working out is, I’ve never really worked out a moment in my life.”

Body dysmorphia: “I don’t want to discount people who genuinely have debilitating body issues. I don’t have that. But I did start getting some body dysmorphia. I’d look in the mirror and I’d see my abs—and when I looked again, they would fade. I would just see the flaws. When I saw that reaction [to my Instagram pics] was when I was like, ‘Okay, I clearly don’t see what’s actually there.’ It’s something that I’m trying to be aware of and be better at, because that’s not a good way to be. You want to be easy on yourself.”

His buffness long-term: “This is a key time to establish how it’s going to be going forward. Because it could very easily go back to how things were. And I can’t do that. The goal is to get energy from the gym so I can go do other stuff. People ask me, ‘Do you think you’re more intimidating now?’ And I’m like, ‘Not at all.’ These muscles are useless. They’re decorative.”

[From Men’s Health]

I get that Kumail was training with a specific goal in mind, and that he took it very seriously and likely spent hours and hours in the gym and all of that. But the whole “chasing the pain” thing seems… I don’t know, weird to me? Yes, the pain comes but then your body deals with the pain by giving you endorphins and that’s why people end up becoming gym rats too: they’re chasing the natural high that comes from working out. Which is clearly where Kumail is now, he talks about how he enjoys the gym and he goes there to relax at this point. So… was it not like that when he was getting shredded? Did he never get that rush of endorphins? I don’t know. I do appreciate how honest and self-aware he is about his body dysmorphia too – very realistic, I think, especially for a guy who just started doing this a year ago, basically. His brain really is rewiring itself.

Photos courtesy of Emily Shur for Men’s Health, sent from promotional Men’s Health email.