THE WILLIAMS BROTHERS ARE TRAINING FOR THE LONG GAME

After nearly dying from a disease he didn't even know he had, Abbott Elementary's Tyler James Williams enlisted his brothers to change their entire approach to fitness and nutrition.

- BEN PAYNTER

FOR YEARS, Tyler James Williams thought of himself as a "hard gainer"-a guy who just can't pack on muscle. He played an adolescent Chris Rock on the sitcom Everybody Hates Chris for much of the mid-aughts, but nearly a decade later, well into his 20s, he was still getting calls to play a certain type. "I was trying to read for roles that were my age and I couldn't get out of high school," he says.

That formerly stuck student went on to become a particularly impressive schoolteacher: Williams, now 30, is best known as the rigid but adorable Gregory Eddie on the ABC mockumentary Abbott Elementary, for which he's earned an Emmy nom and cemented his status as an Internet thirst trap. But that journey included several hard lessons about his health. In fact, it nearly destroyed him.

In his early 20s, for instance, he hired trainers, lifted heavy, and force-fed himself. Once, he chugged a shake with 1,600 calories, only to throw it all back up. In late 2017, at age 24, the five-foot-nine actor crested 130 pounds while juggling a role on Criminal Minds with travel for the period crime drama Detroit. "I was really pushing my body to the limit," he says. "By the time December hit, it just crashed. Everything shut down." Williams had searing stomach pain and couldn't keep anything down-not even the doctor-ordered colonoscopy prep-soa gastroenterologist at NYU Langone diagnosed himusing X-rays. The verdict: His bowels were so inflamed and clogged with scar tissue that he had less than a one-centimetre gap in his terminal ileum, part of the small intestine near the pelvis. It was a massive flare-up from Crohn's disease-a disorder he didn't even know he had.