Why This Netflix Comedian Only Ate Fried Chicken for a Month

Photo Illustration by Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Netflix 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.