The long way up

Olivier Richters was born in Hilversum on 5 September 1989. He was two metres tall at fourteen and 2.10 at seventeen. At nineteen he reached 2.18 metres and stopped growing.

He played basketball until jumper’s knee made climbing stairs difficult. That injury is the reason he started training his legs. His father and brother are both around two metres; his mother is 1.78.

At nineteen he weighed about 80 kilos. People stared, and at some point he accepted that they always would. The first thing he wanted to change was how he felt about his own reflection, so he went to the gym.

He put on 20 kilos in his first two years and then stalled. In the third year he went back to studying: how bodybuilders eat, how they train, how much recovery a body that size needs. He added another 50 kilos over the next five years.

He was born with pectus excavatum, a breastbone that grows inwards. Early in his training years he had it corrected. The operation meant breaking ribs and reshaping his chest while his heart and lungs still had room to grow.

Recovery took six months. For the first two he could barely move. In the third he relearned walking, cycling and swimming. In the fourth he was lifting again.

The body he built runs on routine: seven meals a day at fixed times, the last one on an alarm at three in the morning. When Men’s Health followed him in 2018 he was eating 6,400 calories a day and weighed 150 kilos. He was the cover of the magazine’s November 2018 Dutch issue.

Feeding that schedule was a business problem before it was a business. In March 2013 he founded Muscle Meat with his brother Rein and sister-in-law Yvette: high-protein food made for exactly the way he eats.

On 27 April 2021, in Eemnes, Guinness World Records measured him at 218.3 cm. He had never competed, so at first he turned the title down. Guinness created a separate category for professional, non-competitive bodybuilders, and he became the tallest professional bodybuilder in the world.

The record was announced on 5 October 2021 and printed in the Guinness World Records 2022 book. He had read the book as a child.

Small parts on Dutch television came first, among them Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden and Fashion Planet. In 2018 he shot the British film Ravers, training for its stunts at Pinewood in Cardiff. His model was Richard Kiel, who played Jaws in two James Bond films.

Then came the UK. He auditioned for The King’s Man and waited weeks for the call. A tip from a tall actor he met on Ravers led to an overnight self-tape for Marvel; four weeks later he was cast as Ursa in Black Widow, and on set the part grew from one week to three. He auditioned for The Electrical Life of Louis Wain on a day off from Marvel, against about 25 other big men, and got it.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny took eight months of filming in Morocco, Italy, London and Scotland. He played Hauke opposite Harrison Ford and Mads Mikkelsen. For Borderlands, the plan had been to create Krom with CGI, until the director found him on Instagram.

Reacher changed the brief. Lee Child described the casting of season three as an international search for an actor who could make Reacher look small. Paulie is a main-cast role with lines and a final fight that took four months of stunt training. He turned down two films to do it, one of them Gladiator II.

In October 2026 he is Zangief in Street Fighter, directed by Kitao Sakurai for Paramount and Legendary and shot in Australia in 2025. He studied how Zangief talks, moves and fights in the games before he arrived on set.