What does it look like to become your best self?
For YouTuber and biohacking star Tony Huge — born Anthony Hughes — self-optimization requires an intense amount of ill-advised and often illegal supplements, steroids, and drugs. At least, that’s what he preached
to his 250,000 YouTube subscribers. If the process behind it sounds familiar, that’s because many of Hughes’ techniques have gone from niche subculture to glaringly mainstream, thanks to the wild virality of looksmaxxing star Clavicular. But a new Hulu docuseries, Get Huge: Looksmaxxing To Death, leaves the viral 20-year-old behind to explore the world and legacy of Hughes, a biohacking expert who convinced hundreds of thousands of men to follow his teachings — even as mysterious deaths started to pile up around him.
Directed by Stacey Lee (The Secrets of Hillsong) and executive produced by Jennings Brown and Brett Neitchin, Get Huge takes a fast paced, borderline-psychedelic approach to capturing Hughes’ life and career as a bio-hacking influencer. The three-part series began filming in 2024 and spent months getting up close and personal with Hughes’ and his inner circle, fitness and looksmaxxing influencers like Elon Muscular, Androgenic, Connor Murphy, and of course, Hughes himself. The former bankruptcy attorney started posting on YouTube to promote his supplement company, but abandoned the U.S. on the heels of an active F.D.A. investigation. Now living in Pattaya, Thailand, he films nearly non-stop, capturing his constantly rotating regimen of steroids, recreational drugs, and weightlifting — all while combatting constant bans from YouTube and TikTok. “A day natty is a day wasted,” he says in the series, parroting his signature catchphrase again and again into the camera, accompanied round-the-clock with what he calls his “harem” of Thai women. During his videos, Hughes claims that he is living a male’s ideal life — one he invites both viewers and fellow biohacking and fitness YouTubers to come and experience for themselves.
“Within this influencer space, it’s about the performance of masculinity. They control this one dimensional viewpoint that’s very over the top because that’s what drives traffic,” Lee tells Rolling Stone. “What was important to us was to see if we could puncture that and better understand the difference between the performance of masculinity versus the reality behind the scenes.”
The Tony Huge Lifestyle
The documentary started as a direct result of one of Hughes’ Thailand invitations. In 2022, Hughes convinced a biohacking influencer known online as Leo Longevity — born Laith Abdallah Algaz — to move to Pattaya. (Clavicular has publicly praised the “protocols” for penis enhancement and stretching techniques that Algaz popularized.) The two lived together and collaborated often, posting hundreds of videos about biohacking techniques. But in January 2023, Algaz was found dead in a bathroom in the home he shared with Hughes. He was 34. According to People, an autopsy ruled that Algaz’s cause of death was blunt force trauma. But the mystery of just how Algaz died captured the internet.
“Overnight, all of these YouTubers, influencers, these manosphere alpha-male-Joe-Rogan-wannabes turned into true crime girlies; these internet sleuths trying to solve this murder,” Brown tells Rolling Stone. “As a journalist, how could I not look into that?”
On its surface, Get Huge might present like a true-crime series. Lee, Brown, Neitchin filmed for months in Pattaya, getting unprecedented access into Hughes’ daily life. They filmed in his home, following him around from the gym to pharmacies to hours-long parties, orgies, and streaming sessions. And while Hughes denies any involvement in Algaz’s death, he’s captured on camera struggling to strike a balance between shutting down rumors and using the conspiracy theories to draw in more viewers. But the real meat of the documentary lies in what the crew uncovers about Hughes’ appeal. The success of Tony Huge isn’t just about the excess of his life or the size of his muscles or the countless hours of content he posts every day. His popularity is directly linked to his ability to give young men a purpose — and a community.
The Mystery Behind the Cameras
Algaz wasn’t the only person in Hughes’ orbit who died. One influencer featured heavily in the docuseries is Connor Murphy, a fitness YouTuber who turned to bio-hacking content after failing to break out as an actor. Murphy moved from L.A. to Thailand and became a constant presence in Hughes’ videos — adopting the influencer’s routine of exercise and injections. In July 2026, weeks after the docuseries crew left Thailand, Murphy drowned at the age of 32. When authorities searched his home, they found it trashed, and witnesses reported the fitness influencer acting erratically before his death. Throughout the docuseries, Murphy heartbreakingly brushes off his struggles with mental health, often using their very existence to inspire more extreme content while ignoring warning signs — problems that Hughes often suggested treating with more substances.
“The more we investigated, we found this string of deaths connected to Tony. He’d been pushing these men to experiment on their bodies. He actively was bringing in these lost boys who clearly needed a father figure and found it in Tony,” Brown says. “They’re on this quest of self optimization to become superhuman, but it ultimately leads to self destruction.”
Lee adds that there’s a clear link between the men drawn to looksmaxxing content and those who are struggling with their mental health. Oftentimes, she says, the biggest biohackers and influencers in the space are using their pursuit of physical supremacy to cover or ignore other feelings of inadequacy.
“When you have these deeper emotional issues, they aren’t going to be solved by a hit of testosterone or making [your] jawline bigger,” she says. “Looksmaxxing is a direct lineage from what Tony started all those years ago. Except it’s more nihilistic, because it’s [saying] the consequences of the future do not matter if you can make it, be successful, be a Chad, be Alpha right now. And I think that’s taken things to an even darker place than Tony would go.”
When Brown and Lee started this project in 2024, the world of looksmaxxing was a niche internet subculture. But in only two years, it has become mainstream — and with its popularity has come the likelihood that a new generation of young men will follow Hughes’s teaching, or someone like him.
“Tony came up 10 years ago with this philosophy of radical transparency. He got insanely popular because he was doing things that no one else was willing to do and that formula worked,” Lee says. “Connor comes up in this era and other influencers come up in this era, and they’re all pushing the envelope further and further. And who’s watching but the next generation?”
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