When comedian Mo Gilligan, 38, was first approached about the idea for the new Netflix documentary Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy, he felt like he had won some sort of contest.
“I remember thinking, this is crazy, Netflix is really paying me to eat chicken?” Gilligan recalled to host Matt Wilstein on Obsessed: The Podcast. “I don’t know if we’re going to get the film that they want to produce! That first couple of minutes is me being like, this is great. I can’t even pretend to sugarcoat it, man, I was like, this is really a dream job right now.”
Big Chicken follows Gilligan’s mission to eat fast-food fried chicken for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for 28 days. He visits chicken shops in his native London, then across America, in his quest to understand both the chicken industry and how highly processed food would affect his own body.
The three-time BAFTA winner secured funding from Netflix, got hungry, and—without conducting much background research—began his journey.
At first, Gilligan was like a kid in a candy store—or, rather, a Brit in a chicken shop. The first day of filming consisted of eating fried chicken, driving home through central London, and feeling lucky that a major company was paying for his poultry-saturated whims. He knew his dining habits would impact his health, and though he was worried, “it didn’t keep me up at night,” he said.
But about a week in, there was a “drastic drop” in his well-being, he said. And around the month’s halfway point, he hit a new low.
“When you see me eating chicken with a coffee, it was like, this is real,” Gilligan said. “I don’t want to eat this for breakfast. Not like this. Not with a coffee.”
“The halfway point was probably the hardest because as I’m eating the food, I thought the food would stop tasting good,” he continued. “But it tasted great.”
Gilligan gained weight, began to sweat uncontrollably, suffered bad moods, and took “scary naps” that felt like intense, deep sleep. He started to question whether the sensations were real, or whether his chicken-addled mind was making them up.
As much as the film centers around Gilligan, it also explores the broader chicken industry, from farms to the fryer. It discusses the deep-rooted racial stereotypes linking Black people to fried chicken and how corporate marketing exploits those stereotypes. Gilligan pulled elements from documentaries like 2004’s Super Size Me—where director Morgan Spurlock attempted to eat nothing but McDonald’s for a month as a social experiment—while creating a broader, original narrative.
“I felt we were making something a little bit different because we tried to cover so many parts of fried chicken, but also big chicken as well,” Gilligan said. “And that’s where the film starts to have a shift. We really try our best to cover as much as we can, rather than it feeling like, ‘I’m gonna watch his journey, I’m gonna know what happens to him.’ I think that’s how we try to separate ourselves without trying to replicate what someone has also done.”
Gilligan’s first meal after the documentary was rice with fish and salad, and he avoided chicken altogether for about six months. While touring, he’d opt for a bag of chips from a chicken shop rather than a sandwich. He’d eat pasta with nothing but sauce on top. And then, one day, everything changed.
“I remember being at an event, and I started eating some chicken wings, and it was only then it dawned on me,” he said. “I was like, ‘Bruh, I’m eating chicken.’ Fried chicken, at that. I was like, ‘Wow, this is fried chicken.’ I remember someone looking at me like, ‘You alright?’ and I couldn’t explain to them. Nobody had a clue. Nobody had an absolute clue of what I’d filmed or what I could tell them. I didn’t want to tell anyone, either.”
Big Chicken: A Fast Food Conspiracy is streaming now on Netflix, where you can also watch Gilligan’s three hour-long stand-up specials.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch new episodes of ‘Obsessed: The Podcast’ every Wednesday and Friday. And follow our feed to listen to the show the next morning on your favorite podcast platform.
