Joel McHale has quite the brag. Remember back in October of this year when he showed up shirtless on ESPN’s College GameDay wearing purple and gold body paint? You know, to support the University of Washington Huskies, his alma mater where he was a bench player on the football team in the early ’90s, before they beat the University of Oregon?

“I’m still the best picker this year,” McHale brags.

McHale is on the line to talk about his new commercial work with Snickers, which just released the Snickers Hi Protein with 20 grams of protein. We’re talking about getting swole.

“How dare you, Brandon?” McHale responds. “I’ve been yoked for years, so how dare you? My muscles are as big as your beard.”

The Snickers commercial spot features the former The Soup host doing “Tastebud Training,” with McHale announcing “no more skipping mouth day, America!” while giving his own flappers a cross-fit session. 

Getting Swole with Snickers Hi Protein and Joel McHale

“The guy, Spencer, playing the trainer is my actual trainer,” McHale explains.

“For real?” I ask.

“Yes. That dude is an actual trainer,” McHale continues. “He’s got multiple gyms in Burbank, and he does very well. His last name is Rich and his gym is called Rich Fitness. Look him up, he’s great. And you can win, if you go to snickers.com/tastebudtraining, you could win a bunch of the bars and an actual training session with Spencer and myself.”

Joel McHale’s Guide To Getting Ripped

I ask McHale if he has any particularly savage stories about getting jacked for a role. He calls his philosophy of staying in shape “this very odd diet called ‘you are gonna be half naked on television in three months.'”

“You cut out some of the things in your diet that may be a little caloric, and you start eating, oh, I don’t know, a few Snickers Hi Protein bars,” he suggests. “It’s just repetition. You just gotta hit the weights. Everyone goes, ‘What’s the secret?’ I’m like, ‘Doing it every day.”

So what does McHale, star of stage and screen, consider his most physically demanding roles?

• Reflecting on his time on Community, McHale humorously notes, “I was half naked a lot, and so I just would do pushups on set.”
• For Deliver Us from Evil, his preparation to play a Bronx police officer required a significant commitment to fitness: “I had to be a super in shape police officer in the Bronx.”
• Discussing his role in Happily, where his character is frequently unclothed, he reveals a recurring need for fitness in his roles: “I was half naked all the time again.”

McHale continues:

“I also host this show called Crime Scene Kitchen on Fox. Each season, I find myself gaining 9 pounds, and then I have to get back into working out to lose it for the next season. You know, you hear about people like Tom Cruise, who says, ‘And then I take a cold plunge, and then I work out in the cold plunge pool.’ Well, I’m not like that. Instead, I put on an audiobook, and that’s when I do a lot of squats.

“I really hate squats,” he continues. “But I do them anyway because they’re necessary.”

Side note: McHale explains he’s listening to The Expanse right now, a series of science fiction novels by James S. A. Corey, which is the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

When I tell him my preferred way of staying in shape is eight-mile hikes and taking the stairs, he asks me if I’d use a StairMaster outdoors. I tell him I would, in full sight of my neighbors, like how Terrell Owens worked out in his driveway in 2005 when he was in training camp with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Which brings us to football…

Football

Football

Football

Football

Football

McHale, a walk-on player at the University of Washington under legendary coach Don James (he never never played a snap), refers to this year’s undefeated Washington Huskies squad as the “Snickers Hi Protein bar of college football.”

“Oregon this Friday is gonna be a huge incredible hurdle,” McHale says with a hint of trepidation. “Their will to win is so high that I think we’re going to win.”

But he adds that this season, while fun, has also been “anxiety-inducing.” “Everyone keeps going, ‘Well, that means you’re not that good.’ And I was like, ’12 and 0. We’ve taken on some difficult teams!'”

McHale on PAC-12 Realignment and College Football Playoff Systems

I ask him what he thinks of the end of the PAC-12 as we know it:

“There’s a part of me that’s sad that it’s going away,” McHale confesses, “but the other part is that when college rankings come out, the West Coast never registers on their list. It feels like they throw you a bone or just a token PAC-12 team, and if you lose a single game, then you drop down 30 spots, as opposed to the way the SEC is treated. I think all the polls are highly biased towards the East Coast and South. So, the football players I know, they’re happy about the change because the Big Ten—yeah, obviously, it’s way more than 10—but they will now be in the conversation and playing teams from over there, similar to what the SEC did years ago. So I actually think it’ll be good. Probably not so much fun for Washington State and the Beavers, because when everyone gets out of Dodge, it gets pretty messy. But ultimately, consolidating the conferences is probably the best way to get noticed.”

“I still think there’s a way to make a better playoff system,” McHale continues. ‘It’s still flawed, but there’s a way to do it, that’s not the end. So anyway, it’s the only sport that didn’t have playoffs forever, and then just a computer and some sports writers and coaches decided. It was like, ‘Well, that’s never gonna work.’ And it never did, and it was always disappointing, and the same teams were always in the finals.”

I mention how exciting it will be that programs like Ohio State and Penn State will come through Seattle to watch them play in the Big Ten. But still, as a West Coaster, it has to be a little bittersweet…

“Yeah. And it was distinctly West Coast,” McHale explains.

“That was so great. And other than USC with Pete Carroll years ago, no matter who’s good, they just don’t get the love from the polls. So I think they need to fix the playoff system, they need to tweak it so it’s slightly better, and they need to get rid of all these bowls. The bowls are always there, but anyway. Yes, it will be missed, but 12 and 0 – come on!”