Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter
Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter
This weekend, a crowd of supporters in the US rallied around a 31-year-old restaurant waiter as he ate his 40th roast chicken in as many days. Alexander Tominsky, the Philadelphia Chicken Man, became an Internet sensation as he documented his strange, avian pilgrimage on the Internet. However, as the crowd cheered their unlikely champion, Adam Driver could be heard, somewhere, taunting. You see, eating an obscene amount of chicken is probably what Driver would call “the good old days.” In a 2018 GQ profile, the Star Wars actor revealed that he used to eat a chicken a day while studying at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School for the Performing Arts. It wasn’t a challenge, or a stunt designed to go viral on social media – it was lunch. In addition, Driver also laid six eggs in the morning before running from his Queens apartment to the school’s Manhattan campus. “He would walk to school with a whole chicken in one hand and a jug of water in the other,” Driver’s Juilliard classmate Scott Aiello once recalled. It speaks volumes for Driver’s reputation as one of the toughest men in the business that one can immediately conjure up images of him, crowned in a white headband, speeding across the Brooklyn Bridge on his way to class, a greasy super chicken market that is waved recklessly in the hand. In a post-win interview with The New York Times, Tominsky detailed the effect eating so many salty birds had on his body. The waiter lost 16 pounds (7 kg) during the 40-day marathon, and the amount of sodium he consumed made him believe he could “feel my heart beating in my stomach.” But Driver is different. As Hunter Harris once pointed out for Vulture, Driver is the biggest boy in Hollywood. He was once described by a Vogue editor as “a cross between Raging Bull De Niro and Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck.” His 6ft 2in frame is enhanced by his huge shoulders and thighs that one fan said were “as wide as my whole body”. We have to let Tominski have his day. His feat brought joy to a city that just lost baseball’s World Series and the Major League Soccer Cup Final in one day. But to do that we must remember: Adam Driver walked so Chicken Man could run.
