James Franco knows how to prepare for sex scenes — really, any shirtless scene. In his new movie The Disaster Artist and the upcoming HBO series The Deuce, he really had to show what he was made of. That’s why he chose to eat salads every day for a year, and trust me, it worked!

For The Disaster Artist, “I ate a lot of salads. Like, a year and a half of salads for lunch and dinner,” he said to Entertainment Tonight. “[Wiseau is] unnaturally cut [and] he’s incredibly pale. He looks like a muscular corpse. But I had to depict the making of those scenes, so I started the salads for that and then it just rolled into this and I was like, ‘All right, I’ll keep it up for the 70’s clothes.'”

As for The Deuce, he also served as director. “The truth is, you want to be really professional in those things,” he said about sex scenes. “No goofy rituals, it’s [just] business, everybody up front and honest with each other… All I gotta say is, Maggie Gyllenhaal is the s**t. I mean, she is awesome, all around. Everyone knows she’s an incredible actress… [but] I think she’s going to be the stand-out for this series — she’s so good.”