Bake Off star Matt Lucas reveals heartbreaking family reason he HAD to lose weight
A DRASTICALLY slimmed-down Matt Lucas had Great British Bake Off viewers concerned for his health this week – but he insists he lost the weight precisely because he didn’t want to die young.
The Little Britain funnyman, who is back fronting the new series of the cookery favourite, has gone from size XXXL to a medium, simply by eating less and walking more.
Matt, 48, reveals he went on a health kick because he didn’t want to suffer the same fate as his father and grandfather — who both died from heart attacks in their fifties.
He said: “My dad died when he was 52, very suddenly. His dad died, I think at 56, so I was looking at the law of averages.
“I was very big and I was getting bigger in the pandemic. Sort of not being very active, not really going out, not seeing people, just eating a lot. I was so big I couldn’t really fit on screen any more.”
But it was a transformed Matt who returned alongside co-host Noel Fielding to front the 13th series of Channel 4’s Bake Off on Tuesday.
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But he told the Mid Point podcast: “I’ve still got a proper tummy, I’m not skinny by any means. I’ve just lost some weight. I’ve gone from maybe a double XXL, sometimes triple XXXL, down to a medium.
“I do feel a bit better, I feel a bit relieved. Because the thing is, I don’t do any drugs and I don’t smoke and I hardly ever drink. So it’s just the food really.
“I just don’t eat as much, but I eat sweets still. I like to walk. I live not far from a canal and I love when the weather’s nice going for long walks there.”
Changing his diet involved one simple solution — reducing the one food type he loved and had become obsessed by during lockdown.
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He joked: “I was eating a lot of roast potatoes. You know there’s a lot of food shortages?
“If you went into your supermarket and couldn’t find potatoes, that was me, I have to own up to that.
“There was nothing else to do. I was eating so many roast potatoes that I started making them into different shapes, just to give me something to do.
“I ordered an apple corer off Amazon and started coring potatoes just to see how differently they might roast.
“I’d have a roast potato with a hole in the middle, like a massive doughnut potato. Then the thing that comes out of the core, I was also cooking those, cooking cylinders of potato.”
But Matt is deadly serious when he discusses the impact his weight could have had on his long-term career as well as his health.
He said: “Life is short, and not only life is short, but also our period where anyone wants to hear us and see us is not that long. There’s peaks and troughs.
“At the moment it feels like people want to hire me so I might as well roll with it because there are periods when it gets really quiet.”
There is no overstating just how in-demand Matt has been over the past 12 years.
As well as hosting Bake Off for the past three series, he was Nardole, a regular character on Doctor Who from 2015 to 2017.
He has also starred in movies such as Alice In Wonderland, Bridesmaids and Paddington, which airs on BBC1 on Saturday in place of Strictly, postponed due to the Queen’s death.
Coming up, he will be hosting the reboot of Fantasy Football League on Sky and he is planning to work soon with his former Little Britain partner — and Britain’s Got Talent judge — David Walliams.
My dad died when he was 52, very suddenly. His dad died, I think at 56, so I was looking at the law of averages.
Matt Lucas
They have been pals for three decades and shot to fame making the outrageous BBC sketch show from 2003 to 2006, then spoof documentary series Come Fly With Me in 2010.
But as they became successful, their working relationship grew increasingly tense and they went in very different directions.
Matt said: “We spent almost 20 years together non-stop really. And 14 or 15 of those [we were] writing, the two of us in a room together.
“It was very intense. Even a husband and wife, when they need a bit of space, there’s a way of going, ‘I’m going to take a bit of space’.
“When you’re writing together and you go, ‘Actually we’ve just had a really intense period of work and had a gig’ and then you’re up the next morning doing breakfast TV or something.
“It’s a great privilege, a great honour and we’re lucky, but there are moments where we would have organically taken a break from each other but we couldn’t because of our schedules.
“So there was a period when we didn’t really work together for a long time.”
He continued: “I think it was important when we were reconnecting, to reconnect as friends — let’s just hang out, we don’t just have to sit and say, ‘What are we gonna work together on?’ when we haven’t seen each other for a while.
“So we’ve had that period and it’s been great. David writes numerous books a year and also this is personal to him and I’m not going to go into any detail about this, but he’s an amazing father and he’s very close to his family.
“He has a child and obviously the child should, must and rightly always comes first. But me and David don’t want to do something where we just turn up.”
For their next project they have drawn up plans that hark back to the old days of working as a duo.
Matt said: “We have actually come up with an idea for a show. We’ve got two ideas for TV shows that are really, really strong.
I’d have a roast potato with a hole in the middle, like a massive doughnut potato. Then the thing that comes out of the core, I was also cooking those, cooking cylinders of potato.
Matt Lucas
“One is a bit like Come Fly With Me, in that it’s a particular environment where all our characters would exist, and the other is almost like how you would do Little Britain if you were creating it today.”
He added: “I don’t think anything we do together is going to be as big as what we did before, but I think it needs to be better than what we did before, or at least as good.
“We really both want to do it, we talk about it and swap ideas and it’s just the practical challenge.”
On the subject of practical challenges, the task of preparing Little Britain for on-demand TV services led to a reassessment of its Noughties content in this more woke age.
As a result, some of the more sensitive elements were removed — particularly those relating to foreigners and people of different ethnicities.
Matt has mixed feelings about the shift, but generally approves, saying: “The culture of comedy is very different now. In some ways it is better and in some ways no.
“I think I am pro-woke. Woke is about equality, empathy and fairness. That feels like progress. There are always examples of things not working the way it should but generally, I think it is a big thing.
“I think empathy usually increases as you get older. I am not at peak empathy yet. I think I am more empathetic.”
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He added: “I am all right with ageing. Some things get harder but some things get easier — in a nice way, like not worrying about what other people think.
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“Also, the longer you are around, the more you learn. You see the signs. You are less likely to make the same mistakes again as I have.”
- The Great British Bake Off continues on Channel 4 on Tuesday at 8pm. Paddington airs on BBC1 on Saturday at 7pm.
