‘Perfect Strangers’ star Bronson Pinchot reveals the heartbreaking catalyst for his wellness journey
Two years ago, Bronson Pinchot had a moment of clarity while trying to help his 94-year-old mother get up after she had fallen to the floor.
“She still had all her marbles and then some,” he tells Page Six in an exclusive interview.
“But she was upstairs on the floor and I couldn’t get her up and she didn’t have any core strength to help me.”
“I had to call the paramedics, which was bad.”
The “Perfect Strangers” alum, 65, says that the upsetting incident made him realize that he never wanted to be in that position when he gets older, so he started working out and building his core.
But this isn’t the first time the actor has been on a wellness journey.
In March 2021, the “Risky Business” star told Page Six exclusively that he had lost a staggering 60 pounds toward the end of 2020 after he saw a photo of himself from the 2017 reboot of “Battle of the Network Stars” and was horrified.
His mother’s declining health in 2022, however, made him put the weight back on — “with interest.”
After the “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” alum’s mom passed away, he started a new wellness journey with the help of Ameer Barbour, a personal trainer on Instagram, in 2023.
Since Barbour, who is a chemical and biomolecular engineer during the day, was based in Kansas City, Pinchot became a virtual client.
“I thought, he’s got great advice and he’s so accessible,” Pinchot explains of finding Barbour on Instagram. “He’s unique. He doesn’t have that swagger.”
Pinchot shares that he and Barbour have “a 90-minute FaceTime [call] every week. Plus, I can text him any time of the night or day.”
Barbour also had the actor set up a camera while he worked out so the trainer could see “views from every angle…and then he would say, ‘No, do this, pretend your elbows are going into your back pockets,’ and all this really useful stuff.”
The trainer, 26, tells Page Six that Pinchot went from pressing 50 to 60-pound dumbbells to 100-pound dumbbells for sets of 10, “which is something most gym goers my age can’t do, let alone someone in their 60s.”
Besides getting into physical shape, Pinchot says the workouts have improved his mental health as well.
“The part of me that used to walk around thinking, ‘Wow, I should have a TV show like that [or] I should have that,’ that’s really diminished to almost zero,” he reveals, “because I think, well, you have [my fitness journey] and this is exciting.”
Pinchot adds that any emotion used for over-thinking and self-pitying is subsumed by his intense workout sessions.
Meanwhile, the veteran actor’s career is chugging along nicely.
He will soon be seen in “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” reprising his role as Serge, the art assistant, in the 1984 comedy, “Beverly Hills Cop.”
And even though it’s been 40 years since the original film came out, Pinchot says filming the movie was effortless and felt like no time had passed.
“There’s certainly no rust or cobwebs on it at all,” he says happily.
