Being big was RJ Owens’ calling card onstage and in life. What will happen when there’s not so much of him?
Nothing irks RJ Owens more than when some wise-ass stranger mentions his size. Sure, he stands a towering 6-foot-5, wears size 17 shoes, and recently tipped the scales at 475 pounds — a quarter of a ton. Indeed, he has made that largeness his calling card: For years he’s worked as an actor, magician, and comedian, most recently playing the role of the cuddly Bebe Francois in Cirque du Soleil’s long-running Mystère at the T.I. His girth has broken chairs and collapsed tables.
On the street, you can’t miss him with his shaved head and denim overalls. But walk up and call him big man, big guy, or big fella, with an emphasis on big, and see what happens. “It’s like I’ve never heard that before,” he sighs. “Usually, I’ll respond with ‘Hey, little dude,’ or just ‘Hey, tiny.’” But he reserves a special zinger for those who suggest that he lose some weight. “I’ll say, ‘My grandfather was as large as me, smoked five cigars a day, and every night before he went to bed ate a piece of pie, with some wine and a glass or bourbon. And you want to know his secret to longevity? He minded his own business.’”
For his part, Owens describes himself as “a man of a certain size.”
Still, at age 50, he’s grown weary of the clichés about his weight, the implications that he lacks self-control and suffers personal hygiene issues. Actually, unlike some of his larger-sized brethren, he’s agile and even graceful, can hold his palms to the floor and, friends say, can shred a dance floor. He’s a good cook and considers the kitchen his therapy.
None of that was why, in July, Owens made a life-changing call: to lose a bunch of that weight by undergoing bariatric surgery — reducing his upper stomach from the size of a woman’s shoulder bag to a small, banana-like pouch. The procedure is designed to reduce the amount of food he can eat and quell his appetite. This is, he says, a “deep soul search.” (He’s chronicling this provocative new personal adventure in his podcast, Man of a Certain Size, available at amanofacertainsize.com, which he calls “a fat guy’s journey to and through bariatric surgery.”)
No, Owens decided to change after realizing one day that his size could kill him.
Months ago, he called Adam Sachs, his best friend, fellow stage performer, and a lawyer, with a question: Should he take advantage of his employer’s offer to match his 401K contributions, sacrificing his buying power in the short run to pave the way for a more lucrative retirement starting at age 62.
Sachs was blunt.
“I asked him, ‘Are you going to be around to get that money?’” Sachs says. “I guess it hit him more than I thought it would. But he is a big man, and that’s not good for his heart. All of his friends worry about him.”
In the weeks before his mid-July procedure, Owens pondered the pros and cons of his elective surgery, which he knew would bring about a radical change of life and, at least in the beginning, much physical discomfort.
He also wondered whether becoming a man of a smaller size would dramatically alter the comic persona of a performer who has always been big. “I’m committing career suicide,” he joked back then.
But for Owens, the situation brings up a more profound question: Is fat funny? As he acknowledges on his website, the answer isn’t immediately obvious. “For my entire adult life I have been an entertainer. I have used my size in every comedic way possible,” he writes. “I'm an actor, magician, and Cirque du Soleil clown. My size has played an incredible role in each of these professions. Herein lies the question: Does Fat equal Funny? Is it my crutch or my cement clown shoes?”
*
Robert Jerome Owens grew up in Greenfield, California. His father was a school principal; his mother ran a clerical staff at Soledad Prison. By age 14, he was already 6’5” and weighed 280 pounds. He attracted eyeballs and even as a kid felt comfortable before a crowd.
Not all the attention was welcome. He recalls waiting in line at the grocery store when a boy turned around and gaped.
“Daddy, that man is fat!”
“Son, you don’t say those things,” his father said.
Then Owens’ pager went off, and he moved to grab it.
“Watch out, Daddy!” the boy yelled. “He’s backing up!”
As a youth, Owens’ first acting role was playing a character that was “big as a house, dumb as a fencepost, and honest as the day is long.” Later, he worked at a theater company in Salinas, mostly as a technician and stagehand, until, as he writes on his website, “a director of one of the shows shouted out … ‘Who’s the fat kid? Gimme the FAT KID!’ The rest is, as they say, history.”
He developed his passion for the kitchen when he was 13 and his parents divorced. After 29 years of marriage, his mother said she was done with cooking. So Owens began tuning into PBS cooking shows and a near-300-pound Julia Child was born.
Wherever Owens went, his weight followed. Still, he describes himself as “a graceful fat man. I am exactly like every other human,” he says. “I just need a special office chair to support my weight. Plastic lawn chairs don’t stand up to me at all.”
In 2012, Owens broke a series of chairs while touring with a production in Europe, until the cast began keeping a running tab that pitted “chairs versus RJ.” At one stop in Austria, a manager found one up to the task, an aluminum beast with no arms. He stole it. Problem solved for the rest of the tour.
On Christmas Eve of that year, Cirque du Soleil cast Owens as Bebe Francois, the bonneted clown whose innocent, toddler-like antics quickly became a crowd favorite, though it seems not everyone approves. “Critics ask, ‘What’s the deal with the big fat baby?’” he says. “There’s something about size that some people find offensive.”
Not all the characters’ laughs were planned. In one show, Owens leapt atop a large rubber ball, which exploded under his weight, prompting him to face-plant on the stage floor. The crowd roared. Later, his manager asked, “Can you make that happen every night?”
The weight mishaps came offstage, as well. Sachs recalls a night he and Owens went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. The place was empty, but a waitress told the pair they’d have to wait a half-hour. “She didn’t want RJ there. She wanted us to leave,” Sachs says. “I could tell RJ was upset. He said, ‘This happens to me all the time. People think I’m lazy, that I have no self-control.’”
Owens is anything but lazy. He’s a connoisseur who makes his own bourbon, roasts his own coffee, cures his own sausages, and makes ice cream. Just being in the kitchen is his therapy. “I’m a foodie. I love food, but I am not an overeater,” he says. “People would be gobsmacked to know just know little I eat.” Part of the problem is when he eats. “I never eat before shows, so 80 percent of my meals come after 11 p.m.,” he says.
As he looked into bariatric surgery, Owens talked to dozens of people. What he learned scared him. For the first three months, he would be restricted to an all-liquid diet, and after that soft foods only, servings that amount to half-a-cup in size. He read about the “minefield” of things that can go wrong, such as busted sutures and a reaction known as “dumping syndrome,” when the body struggles with too much starch or sugar. Unable to break the substances down, the stomach dumps it into the intestines, causing havoc.
“You make two commitments with this surgery,” Owens says. “To completely change your habits” — pack-a-day cigarette habit is out the window — “and to see a doctor once a month for the rest of your life.”
And Owens knows this about himself: he’s vain. He’s going to work with a trainer. “I hope to tone,” he says. “Any leftover fat flaps are going to be removed, let me tell you.”
“For RJ, it’s like stepping into the void in the hopes he’ll live longer,” says friend Brett Alters. “It’s going to be a true evolution, a rebirth. But I tell him, ‘You’re an outlier, a 6-foot-5 bald dude. You’ll find your own new image, your own new weirdness.”
But will he be as funny when he’s not as fat? “It’s a loaded question,” Owens says. “Is it because of my size that I’m where I’m at today?” Coworkers who’d heard of his surgery asked: Who’s going to play Bebe Francois? His bosses assure him that the role will still be his, even if he has to wear padding.
Owens can’t wait to try out the new him. He didn’t get fat in order to be funny, he says. “I developed my sense of humor before I developed my size. My weight isn’t funny. I have to find the funny in situations.”
*
The moment he woke up from his surgery, Owens didn’t feel very funny. He was groggy and in pain. He hurt all over. “Recovery is weird,” he says.
Johnny Miles, a fellow Cirque du Soleil performer, drove Owens to and from the hospital. “He was in better sprits when I picked him up than when I dropped him off,” he recalls. “On the way home, he asked if I wanted to stop and get breakfast someplace. That’s RJ. He’d give you the shirt off his back. Only after the surgery it won’t be as big.”
Sachs also gave Owens a couple of FaceTime calls at the hospital.
“I learned that having a bunch of plastic tubes stuck up his nose is not a good look for RJ. Neither are hospital gowns,” he says. “But a few hours later, he looked great.”
And while surgeons may have removed a large part of his stomach, they left his humor intact. “One day, I thought I saw my penis,” he says of his recovery, “but it turned out to be my big toe.”
By mid-August, he had lost 63 pounds. He finally put aside his sweats and rummaged in his closet for pants he hadn’t worn in years. He found a pair of jeans that almost fit him perfectly, except for a fistful of space at his waist. “I’m a drop-your-pants kind of clown,” he says. “But now my pants drop themselves.”
Now, every day brings a different experience, like Bebe Francois encountering a whole new world. While friends are encouraging, they know that he will have to quit cold-turkey much of what once defined his life: cigarettes, whisky, rich foods.
He’s back in the kitchen, too, with a new attitude he might not have recognized a few years ago: “It’s amazing what a full meal a bowl of miso soup with a bit of tofu can be.” In his downtime, he’s playing with the idea of writing a cookbook showing post-op bariatric patients that they can still love food, just less of it. He’s going to call it A Meal of a Certain Size.