But rather than embracing the role of the next Hollywood trainer, Twight turned his focus back to Gym Jones for most of the next decade, before returning to the limelight as Henry Cavill's trainer in 2013's "Man of Steel." After transforming Cavill into the most impressive Superman to take the screen, Twight reprised his training role for the long-simmering sequel of "300," titled "300: Rise of an Empire," which comes out today. The film and its grueling workout regimen became the stuff of legend. Star Gerard Butler later said it was the first time anyone had called him "fat." He gave his subjects no quarter they trained together shirtless in a single hall in Montreal, ate customized meals, and were subjected to regular unflinching critiques. A former world-class alpinist, Twight applied all the intense physicality and strategic planning of his previous career to the challenge of making men look like mountains.
These bodies, it turned out, were the result of a perfect storm of training and nutrition factors, all orchestrated by trainer Mark Twight and the staff from his Salt Lake City-based gym, Gym Jones. But in "300," every single Spartan, dozens in all, perfectly blended the cuts of a comic-book superhero with the classical lines of Jacques-Louis David's "Leonidas at Thermopylae" -all while looking dirtier, tougher, and more defined than either.
Plenty of other movies had featured ripped leads, villains, or characters. From the opening minutes of "300," it was clear that director Zach Snyder's 2006 film set a new standard for physiques on the screen.