Oh my god,’ Nicholas Galitzine says, squinting in disbelief. He exhales, pulling himself together. ‘It’s very, very trippy.’
The 31-year-old actor is closely inspecting a He-Man action figure. He-Man toys, with their bulging muscles, minimal clothing and blond bob, have been produced in one form or another since 1982. But this He-Man is different. This He-Man looks just like Galitzine, the actor tasked with bringing Prince Adam of Eternia and his all-powerful alter ego, He-Man, to life in the new Masters of the Universe film from Amazon MGM Studios.
‘It’s very surreal,’ he continues, looking decidedly un-He-Man-like during a period of downtime on the film’s press tour in Berlin. His hair is a neat mess of brown, his gaze is intense, and he’s paired a white shirt with blue-and-green checked pyjama bottoms. Despite the casual look, he has undeniable big-screen presence.
Back when Galitzine was a kid in west London, his parents encouraged him to spend less time watching television and more time using his imagination. That meant plenty of hours spent with toys just like the one he’s now holding.
‘Playing with action figures birthed my sense of creativity and imagination, in some sense,’ he says. ‘And so it’ll be a very good Christmas gift to all my nieces and nephews.’
He pauses before adding:
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‘Maybe a bit egocentric to hand out versions of yourself to people, but still.’
And ‘egocentric’ is an interesting choice of word. Because if you’ve dismissed Masters as just another retro superhero story, you’ve missed the fact that He-Man was always more complicated than that.
Yes, the original series featured a muscle-bound hero in a loincloth traversing the universe to fend off evil villains, but He-Man himself was surprisingly nuanced. Masters, I promise, isn’t your typical blockbuster. Beyond the hulking hero, there’s a story about found family, father-son relationships, masculinity and plenty of self-deprecating humour.
It’s less Avengers: Endgame and – brace yourself – more Barbie.
Controversial? Perhaps.
Ever since the teaser trailer dropped earlier this year, Masters has attracted plenty of trolling online. A pronoun joke slipped into one teaser clip led certain corners of the internet to declare He-Man ‘woke’ before the film had even been released.
But Masters arrives at a time when masculinity itself feels like it’s being redefined through testosterone, peptides and #looksmaxxing trends that promise to turn any man into a modern-day He-Man.
Galitzine smirks when the topic comes up.
‘The muscles don’t maketh the man, really,’ he says. ‘We live in a physical world, and the aesthetics of both things and people obviously have value in it, whether we like it or not.
‘I mean, He-Man’s superpower is his ability to really connect with people and embrace them and embolden them and collaborate with them. It’s not the superficial.’
But the muscles definitely signal something.
Despite the oversaturation of the superhero genre, He-Man feels somewhat lost to the sands of time – stuck, for the moment, as a relic of the ’80s.
He-Man’s origin story (at least in this latest version) is no more ridiculous than any other superhero’s. Prince Adam, our hero, comes from a faraway land called Eternia. His parents are King Randor and Queen Marlena, and Adam struggles to live up to their expectations – particularly those of his royal father.
Vitally, there’s something called Castle Grayskull, a fortress that houses the aptly named Sword of Power. This sword grants whoever wields it the ultimate strength in the universe after they utter a simple incantation: ‘By the power of Grayskull’, to which Adam, once chosen as champion, adds: ‘I have the power!’
Those two lines transform him into the hero known as He-Man and give him one of the most iconic catchphrases in pop culture.
Galitzine, who was born in 1994, wasn’t around when Masters of the Universe was at the peak of its popularity (a period that included the Dolph Lundgren-led film in 1987). But when he read the script for this latest version, he was sold.
He’d been working steadily as an actor since 2014 and began landing bigger roles during the 2020s, appearing in Netflix’s Purple Hearts and Prime Video’s Red, White & Royal Blue. He then flexed his comedy muscles as a dickhead football jock in 2023’s Bottoms before romancing Anne Hathaway in the 2024 romcom The Idea of You.
But those projects leaned heavily towards romance and drama. They’re a far cry from Masters of the Universe and, for Galitzine, that was precisely the appeal.
‘I’m not someone who necessarily just wants to make arthouse films all the time, but I need it to feel like there’s some sort of nuance, or multifacetedness, or moral grey, or something very human that I can dive into if it’s going to have such public appeal and be such a big studio machine,’ he says.
Masters had all of that: humour, poignancy, emotion and a huge amount of action.
‘I really, truly felt like I fully understood who this man was,’ Galitzine says.
So he told his team he was interested. Eventually, that led to a make-or-break meeting with director Travis Knight.
‘When I first met with Nick, he completely sold me,’ Knight says. ‘I was absolutely besotted with him. He’s so completely charming. He’s warm, he’s funny, he’s sweet, and he’s got a big heart – and that was the key thing. That’s what I wanted Adam to be.
‘Now, the missing ingredient was that he’d never played an action hero before. He’d never been He-Man. And so that was something he needed to do. But I knew he could do it.’
Once Galitzine officially landed the role, he knew exactly what lay ahead.
While researching everything ever written, drawn or imagined about He-Man, he also had to completely transform his body.
At no point does Galitzine look more annoyed than when he has to think about what, exactly, he had to eat during his Masters of the Universe transformation, which took him from around 80kg all the way up to 105kg before a cutting phase brought him back down to roughly 91kg.
His eyes widen. He exhales for a few seconds.
‘I mean, truthfully, it was a lot of the typical stuff: a lot of rice, a lot of chicken – not just chicken, but beef and lamb,’ he explains. ‘I mean, there were about six meals a day. I remember it being 10pm and getting a text from my trainer saying, “You eating your sixth meal yet?” And you’re full, and you’re looking at this big pot of rice and protein. You just feel your stomach expanding week on week.’
During his bulking phase, Galitzine consumed as many as 5,000 calories a day, while also fitting in three-hour weight-training sessions and specialist preparation for as many of the film’s stunts as possible.
He’d always been fit – particularly during his rugby-playing days – but had never added that kind of size in just four or five months.
The cut was even harder.
His calories dropped to roughly 1,900 a day, alongside weight training, hours spent walking on an incline treadmill and more stunt work.
His ‘treat’? Zero-calorie fizzy drinks.
‘Having my Coke Zero at lunchtime, I was like, “Oh my God, yes”,’ he says.
Knight credits the work Galitzine put in before cameras even started rolling, particularly given some of the shortcuts that exist within the industry.
‘The thing these guys have got to go through – and there are shortcuts, which we won’t speak of, that I know some actors have used to get there. We were not going to do that,’ he says.
‘I did not want this man to destroy his body for the sake of the film. So he did it the right way, and he did it the hard way.’
The physical transformation was unlike anything Galitzine had experienced before.
He remembers attending an Emporio Armani event at the peak of his bulk and feeling almost unrecognisable to himself.
‘This notion of being perceived in a state that didn’t feel like me was really, really terrifying,’ he says.
When I see Galitzine a few days later at the photoshoot for this story, I have the same reaction many men have when they see someone looking absolutely shredded: I need to get into better shape.
Drawing attention to himself is not in Galitzine’s nature. He carries himself without pretence and seems intent on keeping as low a profile as an ascending film star possibly can.
But when he’s exercising his arms and flexing the same triceps I’ve now seen him use to punch Skeletor in the face, it’s difficult to look away.
My reaction isn’t far from that of many people who saw Galitzine after his transformation.
Camila Mendes, who plays Adam’s childhood friend and fellow warrior Teela in Masters, trained with him briefly in Los Angeles. When production began in London, she was stunned.
‘He was huge,’ she says. ‘I was like, “This is not the Nick I met.” It was truly unbelievable.’
Then I come back to reality slightly: he is, after all, literally He-Man.
And even Galitzine recognises that what he achieved is far from ordinary.
‘A lot of people think this is quite attainable, but it was a full-time job for me.’
Despite his superhuman physique, Galitzine has the energy of the nicest guy in the room. He’ll remember details from previous conversations. He’ll laugh – or at least chuckle – at all your attempts at humour. He’ll happily talk a bit of rubbish about social media influencers who probably deserve it.
At six feet tall and with a still-ridiculously-ripped physique, Galitzine is likely to be the biggest person in most rooms. Again: he’s literally He-Man.
But there’s nothing intimidating about him. He feels more like the bloke you’ve just played a game of basketball with before heading off for a pint and some food. (Coincidentally, he’s heading to a recording of Hot Ones after we wrap up.)
All of that hard work, however, paid off.
Because there’s a moment in the film – you already know the one – when Adam first picks up the Sword of Power, utters those famous words and transforms from Prince Adam into the mighty He-Man.
When the sequence, which arrives roughly halfway through the film, was shot, it was a major day on set.
‘I don’t know if it’s as iconic as “The name’s Bond. James Bond.” But it’s up there in terms of how much you associate that line with the character,’ Galitzine says. ‘And so people are expecting something from you.’
On the day, on the biggest set the production had built, Galitzine recalls more than 300 crew members gathering to watch the scene come to life.
Knowing its significance – the culmination of what Adam has spent virtually his entire life searching for – and the emotion attached to it, Galitzine knew it had to be special.
He knew he had to get it right.
He says he deliberately avoided over-rehearsing the moment because he wanted to experience the emotion genuinely the first time he delivered the line. With Knight’s approval, rehearsals were kept to a minimum.
Then the cameras rolled.
‘By the power of Grayskull, I have the power!’
The skies open. A blinding light transforms Adam into He-Man, revealing not only the Sword of Power but the superhuman physique that comes with it.
Epic by any measure.
But Galitzine thought he’d blown it.
‘Travis came out from behind the monitor and I’m thinking, “Oh, fuck. Here we go. I’m getting fired,”’ Galitzine says. ‘But we just shared a really beautiful embrace.’
And, as Knight tells it, the moment carried genuine emotional weight.
As a lifelong Masters fan, he was already thrilled to see characters like Ram-Man, Fisto and Skeletor brought to life on screen – let alone in a film he was directing.
But witnessing the transformation sequence was something else entirely.
‘I will admit that I welled up a little bit in that moment,’ Knight says. ‘I had chills, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck and there were tears stinging my eyes because I was just so moved by the whole experience.’
The scene feels earned because we’ve spent the first half of the film watching Adam not as the wise-cracking action hero that’s become common in modern blockbusters, but as an earnest, humble and fundamentally ordinary person.
The Adam we meet isn’t the coolest guy in town. He’s stuck in a dull job, living with a flatmate and enduring disastrous Hinge dates.
Because we first meet him as a child desperately trying to earn his father’s approval and follow him into an adulthood shaped by disappointment, we end up rooting for him.
He’s not entitled, despite literally being royalty.
He’s not arrogant, despite being tall, handsome and physically imposing.
He’s just a bloke trying to make the best of the hand he’s been dealt.
The way Masters embraces its earnestness extends to the camp at the heart of its story and characters. It’s a film fully aware of how silly some of this is, populated by characters and performers who seem equally aware of it.
In many ways, the explosive energy behind Masters feels like a course correction for a culture that’s become reluctant to embrace anything a little goofy or unabashedly fun.
‘I worry that sometimes we’ve lost this real sense of sincerity in these worlds,’ Galitzine says. ‘I think, alongside the lack of colour and vibrancy in a lot of these films in recent years, we’ve also lost the vibrancy of performance.
‘Yes, this is honest, sincere and very silly, but we can really enjoy it. We obviously still poke fun at ourselves, but there’s nothing embarrassed about it.’
Which is to say that humour plays a major role in what the film is trying to do.
For all the jokes about ridiculous names, ridiculous powers, giant men with ridiculous haircuts and pink button-down shirts, there’s a self-awareness running through the film – one that arguably speaks to where men find themselves right now.
During the franchise’s original run in the 1980s, He-Man represented the cultural ideal of masculinity: broad shoulders, enormous muscles and weekly acts of heroism. Even with the slightly ridiculous haircut, he embodied what many men thought they were supposed to be.
But beneath the muscles, the original story suggested something deeper.
‘Even though he looks like your classic action hero with all those muscles, he was never a guy who would throw a punch at the beginning,’ Knight says, explaining the character’s appeal.
‘He was always someone looking for common ground, someone who spoke about empathy, kindness and friendship.
‘And so I remember, as a kid, it was seismic to discover that you could be both strong and decent. It became something to aspire to.’
The new film understands that. Adam’s physique isn’t treated as something to be worshipped, but simply one part of who he is.
Nowhere is that clearer than during a stretch of the story in which Adam is living on Earth after being hidden away from Eternia. He’s not greased up in a sleeveless vest or posing for social media. Instead, he’s wearing the same pink button-down shirt layered over a white T-shirt and working a job in human resources.
‘I find this looksmaxxing to be a little bit comical,’ Galitzine says. ‘It’s very lacking in self-awareness at times, and there’s humour in it, but we’ve always done some version of that.
‘Make-up is as old as time, and I suppose you could say that’s looksmaxxing in some ways. But where it’s going now seems completely out of control.’
Galitzine says he doesn’t really buy into conversations about masculinity as a rigid binary – all the expectations, pressures and assumptions that come with it.
In fact, he admits he feels slightly awkward discussing it because it reminds him of his own teenage years as an athlete and rugby player.
Growing up in that environment – surrounded by machismo and with many teammates embodying the classic rugby-lad archetype – triggered something of an existential crisis at a surprisingly young age.
‘I was 14, 15, 16, and I had this real looming sense of cosmic wonder and fear,’ he says. ‘I was really, really sensitive and emotional and I had no outlet for it. In many ways, it wasn’t until acting that I found a way to process all of that.’
Adam’s journey in Masters of the Universe – his desire to become the man he believes his father always wanted him to be, and the man he thinks his world needs him to be – resonates deeply with Galitzine.
Partly because his own upbringing looked very different.
‘I had fantastic male role models in my father, my uncles and my grandfather,’ he says. ‘But I also grew up around a lot of amazing women.
‘And so these concepts of masculinity and femininity feel quite rudimentary to me. How something as complex as humanity can be reduced to a binary is almost laughable.
‘I really, truly believe the character I’m playing embodies the best of both worlds.’
After all, why can’t someone be physically imposing, capable of punching villains across a room, while also being kind, thoughtful, emotionally intelligent and eager to solve problems?
‘For me, it’s not really a conversation that needs to be had; it’s just reality,’ Galitzine continues, becoming noticeably more animated as he speaks.
‘We are many, many things, and we should embrace those many, many things.
‘This idea that men should be able to talk about how they feel is obviously central to our film, but hopefully it’s also something the film can encourage in other young men.’
Galitzine still has plenty of work ahead of him.
His upcoming projects span almost every genre imaginable.
Next comes The Mosquito Bowl, the first film he shot after Masters. Directed by Peter Berg, it tells the true story of a football game played by US Marines as they prepared for the Battle of Okinawa during the Second World War, based on Buzz Bissinger’s non-fiction book of the same name.
Galitzine says Berg repeatedly texted him before filming began, worried he might arrive looking too much like He-Man – a physique that simply wouldn’t have existed in the 1940s.
So Galitzine took the hint.
He stopped lifting weights for a while and gave himself permission to eat whatever he wanted.
His five-month stint on The Mosquito Bowl came immediately after spending nine months on Masters of the Universe, and before filming the Red, White & Royal Blue sequel, Red, White & Royal Wedding.
That was then followed by The Return of Stanley Atwell, a mystery thriller based on an original story by Steven Soderbergh.
By his own calculation, he’ll have completed eight films back-to-back without a proper break.
‘I keep telling him he should take a break because he’s been going non-stop,’ says Mendes, his Masters co-star. ‘Since Masters wrapped, he’s gone straight into another project and then another. That just speaks to how talented he is and what lies ahead for him.
‘I’ve told him, “At any point, you can take a break and trust that there’ll still be work waiting for you on the other side. You’re always going to be employed.”’
Galitzine insists he plans to take that advice.
Just not yet.
There’s another, as-yet-unannounced film he’s working on that explores the idea of being a scapegoat, as well as a project with Gus Van Sant that he describes as ‘very much a character piece’.
And, frankly, he’d love to do a horror film. Or perhaps a sci-fi horror. Or even a sci-fi horror based on a video game.
Really, any of the above would do.
But as his career gathers momentum and his calendar fills years in advance, a tension is beginning to emerge. As much as he wants to do all of these projects, finding the time to do them is becoming increasingly difficult.
‘What you’re going to see from me over the next few years are films I feel really, really passionate about, for very different reasons,’ he says.
‘To me, the greats are the people who are completely unpredictable and surprising.’
