‘They’re just live experiments’: the dark, deadly world of looksmaxxing

Adrian Horton Sat, November 7, 2026 at 10:02 AM UTC

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‘It is really disconcerting when these really complex emotional problems that everyone faces are simplified down to like, get a bigger jaw.’Photograph: Disney

If you’ve heard the term looksmaxxing – the manospheric pursuit of male aesthetic beauty via steroids, peptides, cosmetic surgery and total commitment – you probably know the name Clavicular. With more than 2 million followers and a cluster of mainstream media profiles, the 20-year-old streamer born Braden Peters has become the chiseled face of a once fringe movement to achieve algorithmically defined good looks by any means necessary, from daily methamphetamines to breaking your jaw with a hammer. Clavicular has courted attention for a nihilistic worldview expressed in blunt, idiosyncratic argot: “hardmaxxing”, “bone smashing”, anything to increase your “SMV” (sexual market value).

Related: ‘Never big enough’: inside the booming penis enlargement industry

Baffling, horrifying or grimly compelling, depending on your view, Clavicular would be a fascinating documentary subject. Indeed, news of a possible Clavicular documentary has percolated all year, after the influencer filed a cease and desist letter against Disney/Hulu for allegedly filming him backstage at a New York fashion show in February. (It’s far from his most serious legal matter this year – last month, he pleaded guilty to charges that he raped a 17-year-old girl at his family’s Massachusetts home in May 2025.) But the docuseries in question, Get Huge: Looksmaxxing to Death, was never actually about Clavicular, who appears only in publicly available snippets. It instead trains its focus upstream of the bone-smashing, on the infamous influencer’s influences: the so-called “biohacking” scene that inspired the youths’ fixation on extreme body modification. And in particular, supplement guru Dr Tony Huge and his acolytes, in the aftermath of the suspicious death of his close associate, the “penis enlargement” expert known as “Leo Longevity”.

“This was a very fringe movement when we began this documentary,” said Stacey Lee, the director of the three-part series. But its influence seemed to expand as rapidly as the subjects’ roided muscles once filming commenced in 2024. “Clavicular grew up on Leo Longevity,” Lee said. “These kids are growing up on that. They are feeding on these projections of masculinity, and we are watching it in real time. What Tony was putting online 10 years ago is being recreated in shorter, faster, far more extreme forms.”

To be clear, the man born Anthony Hughes never advocated for moderation. A former bankruptcy attorney turned bodybuilder with muscles that appear perpetually at risk of bursting through his skin, Tony initially made his “biohacking” name for trying, on camera, the “fat-burning” “supplement” DNP that could, in even mildly excess doses, melt internal organs. A prolific user of steroids and experimenter with substances from the dubious to illicit, Hughes projected brawny confidence at a time when, as he puts it in the first episode, “Society doesn’t have a place for masculine men any more.” (Get Huge is, among other things, a very difficult watch for those with an aversion to “manosphere” bluster, or needles, which jab with stunning frequency.)

To his 250,000 online followers, Hughes hammered the mantra: “a day natty [natural] is a day wasted”. To not be biohacking was to be “beta and controllable”, missing the opportunity to be bigger and better. “They’re just live experiments,” said Lee of the mindset. “Every day is another science experiment to see what I can do with my body in order to augment it.” Ubiquitous daily injections in the face, neck, arm, rear is “the world. To them, it’s like drinking water.” To skirt US regulatory scrutiny – and, as later episodes explore, civil lawsuits and criminal investigations – Hughes relocated to Pattaya, Thailand, in 2017, where he gathered a clique of “passport bros” for content and a self-proclaimed “harem” of paid women. (“A man should only have as many girlfriends as he can leg press,” he says while holding up a pyramid of Thai women.)

Lee, a mother of a nine-year-old son concerned by the far-rightward lurch of male influencers, caught up with Hughes there in 2024, “and immediately it was just doors wide open”, she recalled. “Tony’s whole philosophy is radical transparency – ‘come on in, nothing to hide here’.” The camera crew trailed Tony and two close associates, Elon Muscular and Connor Murphy, as they gym, roid, rip through Pattaya’s sex-work scene and, above all, film. But it was transparency in name only. “We realized quickly that these guys are performers,” Lee said. “They create characters for the internet. And the character for the internet projects radical transparency. What does the human, when the internet is turned off, what are they like?” For young men, “these guys are projecting this blueprint for how to live their lives. We wanted to puncture that and get beneath it.”

Related: ‘The face doesn’t move’: Hollywood’s obsession with cosmetic surgeries has led to stiffer looks – and performances

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Part of that was simply asking questions about what happened to Leo, born Laith Abdullah Algaz, who was found dead in the house he shared with Hughes in January 2023; authorities ruled the cause as blunt force trauma, source unknown. A self-proclaimed penis enlargement expert who fled to Thailand after his estranged wife filed a restraining order, Leo quickly developed an intense bromance with Hughes. (As Elon recalls: “They were more than friends. There was fire between them.”) But the relationship was souring by the end – and Leo, as Lee uncovered, was not the first Tony Huge “ride or die” to actually die. As Get Huge gets deeper, Lee learns that four other close Hughes associates have either died or disappeared under questionable circumstances since 2018, ranging from overdoses to house fire to hanging. And the camera pans out to the making of the documentary itself, as Hughes, Elon Muscular and Murphy, each surely surpassing the daily injectables limit – Murphy claims to be taking anywhere from a dozen to 100 “compounds” per day – snipe at each other and scrap for narrative control.

Lee declined to offer a theory on what happened to Leo or the other men in Hughes’s orbit. “It was more important for us that the theories become a conduit to expose the different systems of this masculine philosophy,” she said. “When people die, I think most people would just be like, ‘Hold up, let’s pump the brakes.’ But that doesn’t happen because they’re part of a community, there is a sense of belonging and they’re almost reinforced in this mindset of like, ‘Oops, we got the experiment wrong, let’s not do that next time.’

“It is really disconcerting when these really complex emotional problems that everyone faces are simplified down to like, get a bigger jaw. Fix your brow line. And make your penis bigger.”

Get Huge certainly contains many disconcerting observations, from the ridiculous (Elon Muscular’s attempt to brand Hughes “the Hugh Hefner of biohacking”) to the sinister (Hughes requesting his “girlfriends” always be naked or wearing “sexy clothes” in his bedroom). But it is a surprisingly empathetic look at an emotionally stunted scene. At one point, Lee point-blank tells Elon that he is enough. “Someone should tell me how I’m supposed to be enough,” he responds.

“I don’t think anyone sets out to do extreme dangerous, violent things,” Lee said of her approach. “I think this really begins in a very human place that we can all relate to, which is how do we become the best version of ourselves. But in this looksmaxxing, biohacking, bodybuilding world where there’s this notion of perfection – and I think we can relate to this as women, too – when those goalposts keep shifting, it’s very hard to know when enough is enough.”

Related: Behind the rise of Clavicular and ‘looksmaxxing’ there are insecure young men who feel they don’t measure up | Jason Okundaye

It may never be; in July of this year, two months after filming wrapped, Murphy drowned in the lake behind his house at the age of 32. Eyewitness and police accounts suggest he was experiencing a psychotic break; he had recently documented his attempts to inject himself with pure gold. His death was an emotional blow to Lee and her crew. “Just tragic,” she said. “We were completely floored. We were really upset.” Murphy had, she said, “seemingly become more unstable”, over 18 months of filming. “And I said to Tony and Elon and the friends around, like, ‘Are you guys worried about Connor?’ And this is the hard thing with someone like Connor – he’s like, ‘I’m just performing. This is an act.’ We were trying to penetrate that. Like, what is a performance? What is real?”

“We were definitely witnessing and trying to document what we were experiencing in real time,” she added. “But I think what was the more surprising thing was how everybody else didn’t have any concerns.” The series, she hopes, will present “a more complicated, multidimensional person behind this online performance”.

Get Huge offers few answers, either to the question of what happened to Leo Longevity and Connor Murphy, or how to get someone out of nihilistic spiral in an interminably aesthetics obsessed world. “Where the solutions lie in all of this is what we’re consuming online – looking for more authentic, real role models for young men to look up to,” Lee said. Short of that, Get Huge proposes two supplements in short supply: compassion and skepticism. “We weren’t coming in here pointing a finger,” said Lee. “We want audiences to have these conversations. We want audiences to think, decipher, discern what is real and what is not.”

Get Huge: Looksmaxxing to Death is available on Hulu in the US on 10 November and Disney+ elsewhere

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”