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Comedian Mo Gilligan has described the distressing effects of eating fried chicken for every meal, after undertaking the month-long challenge in a new Netflix film.
Drawing inspiration from the hit 2004 documentary Super Size Me–in which filmmaker Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s meals for a month and charted the effects –British comedian Gilligan committed to consuming fast-food chicken for three meals a day, 28 days straight.
“I remember thinking, this is crazy, Netflix is really paying me to eat chicken?” Gilligan told Matt Wilstein on a new episode of Obsessed: The Podcast. “I don’t know if we’re going to get the film that they want to produce! That first couple of minutes is me being like, this is great. I can’t even pretend to sugarcoat it, man, I was like, this is really a dream job right now.”
Gilligan admitted that while he was conscious of the possibility of side effects, the prospect of damage to his health “didn’t keep me up at night”.
Halfway through the task, however, he began to experience a number of changes – and was unable to tell if they were physiological or imagined.
As Gilligan told the podcast, there was a “drastic drop” in his wellbeing after a week, and things got worse another week later. The comic said that he gained weight, started sweating uncontrollably, and suffered mood swings. He also fell into the habit of taking “scary naps” – which felt like deep and intense sleep.
“When you see me eating chicken with a coffee, it was like, this is real,” Gilligan said. “I don’t want to eat this for breakfast. Not like this. Not with a coffee.
“The halfway point was probably the hardest because as I’m eating the food, I thought the food would stop tasting good,” he added. “But it tasted great.”
The documentary also examines the chicken industry beyond Gilligan’s own experience, digging into racial stereotypes around fried chicken, and broader issues around the British fast food sector.
“I felt we were making something a little bit different because we tried to cover so many parts of fried chicken, but also big chicken as well,” Gilligan said. “And that’s where the film starts to have a shift.
“We really try our best to cover as much as we can, rather than it feeling like, ‘I’m gonna watch his journey, I’m gonna know what happens to him.’ I think that’s how we try to separate ourselves without trying to replicate what someone has also done.”
Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracyis available to stream now on Netflix.
