Morgan Spurlock, Director of ‘Super Size Me’ About Junk Food, Dies

Director, screenwriter and actor, Morgan Spurlock began his career in cinema in 1994 as a production assistant on the film “Léon” by Luc Besson.

American director Morgan Spurlock, who achieved notoriety with his documentary on McDonald’s “Super Size Me” in 2004, has died at the age of 53 from complications of cancer. “It’s a sad day, when we said goodbye to my brother Morgan. The world lost a true creative genius and a special man. I am proud to have had the opportunity to work with him,” said his brother Craig Spurlock, who was involved in several of his projects. Al Jean, the screenwriter and producer of the famous animated series The Simpsonspaid tribute on his X account (ex-Twitter) to “a very talented, funny and brilliant man”deploring “a great loss”.

Director, screenwriter and actor, Morgan Spurlock, born in West Virginia in 1970, began his career in cinema in 1994 as a production assistant on the film Leon by Luc Besson, with Jean Reno, Gary Oldman and Natalie Portman in the main roles.

His career really took off with the production of his documentary Super Size Me, in which he depicted himself exclusively consuming, for 30 days, the most copious menu offered by McDonald’s in the United States, the “super size”, morning noon and evening. All this while limiting your physical expenditure to 5,000 daily steps, the average for a New York resident. The goal: to measure the effects on your body. At the end of his experiment, Morgan Spurlock, then aged 32, had gained more than ten kilos, seen his cholesterol soar, his liver deteriorate due to excess fat and was subject to sexual problems. .

The film, nominated for an Oscar in the category “best documentary”, had fueled the debate on the harmful effects of the fast-food industry on public health, particularly at a time when the United States was facing an increase in cases of obesity.

In 2007, a Swedish university, however, carried out a similar experiment, a group of students having to eat only fast food, not exclusively from McDonald’s, for a month. If students gained between 5% and 15% extra weight and felt “tired and bloated”, none had developed the symptoms described by Morgan Spurlock at the end of his documentary. Part of the film’s conclusions were also called into question in 2017, after Morgan Spurlock admitted “drinking regularly since the age of 13”. “I have never been sober for more than a week in 30 years,” he had said.

He made a total of around fifteen documentaries, almost systematically directing himself, including Where is Osama bin Laden? in 2008, in which he traveled the world in search of the former leader of Al-Qaeda. His latest film, Super Size Me 2, carried out in 2017, focused on the commercial strategies of fast-food giants, in order to present their products in a better light, in terms of health.