Lee Priest is Australia’s most celebrated and photographed body builder.
But after spending 16 years climbing to the peak of the world body building circuit, Priest has decided to settle down in Aberglasslyn.
He concedes that after a year in magic school where his self-esteem was left in tatters, he decided to prove his critics wrong.
“I was really into magic as a kid, I actually went to magic school for a year,” Priest said.
“I had really low self esteem and would worry about stuffing up the acts whenever I did it. So when I told people I was going to go on stage and do body building, nobody believed me.”
After becoming Mr Australia at the ages of 17, 18 and 19, Priest said it was time to advance his career through the more lucrative American body building circuit.
And he did. Aside from competing in countless body building competitions and developing a cult following, the now 36-year-old Priest considers himself a “good friend” to body building’s elder-statesman Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Priest boasts, among hundreds of career accolades, top six finishes in the Mr Olympia competition in 1997, 1998, 2000, 2002.
Mr Olympia is arguably the most esteemed competition in the sport of body building.
On top of this he has had numerous top ten finishes in the prestigious Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic and he won the San Francisco Pro Show in 2002 and the Arnold Pro Show in 2005.
While the rest of us can’t imagine what it takes to produce a body like his, Priest sees training for his sport like going to work in any other job and says it comes to him as naturally as breathing.
“I guess it’s like any job. There are things I don’t like about it sometimes,” he said.
“But everyone has those days where they don’t want to get up in the morning.
“Now training is like breathing to me.”
At 1.65 metres tall and a competition weight of around 95kg, Priest is among the shortest body builders on the professional circuit.
His unique shape made the Hunter-grown powerhouse perfect for the screen.
Priest contributed to the revival of The Hulk, acting as a body model for the movie’s action scenes in Eric Banner’s 2003 portrayal of the comic figure.
“They used my body to see how the muscles move in all the different action scenes. They would take measurements off me and feed them into the computer. That was fun,” he said.
For Priest this continued a fantasy relationship with his work as he maintains he “never wanted to be a body builder, I just wanted to look like the He-Man character.”
And while Priest may have opted to return to friends and family, he has no plans to stop competing on the world stage.
“I came back here when my grandfather died and when my grandmother died, and just being around family again made me want to come home,” he said.
“I can still compete though. I have been sponsored by Body Ripped, a supplement company in Melbourne and so I will keep training here and go over to the States to compete.”