‘Seinfeld’s Wayne Knight Says Weight Loss Tanked His Career

TMZ caught up with Wayne Knight — Seinfeld’s Newman — at an airport recently, but it’s an interaction that almost didn’t happen. Why not? The site’s intrepid reporter almost didn’t recognize Knight thanks to his significant weight loss. “From about Jurassic Park to now,” Knight revealed, he’s lost about 110 pounds. 

That’s great for Knight’s health, but not necessarily fantastic for his career. When asked if his weight loss was affecting his career in a good way or a bad way, Knight candidly replied, “In a bad way. But it takes time for people to accept you as you are. Then they find out whether or not you can still do things without being fat.”

Knight joked that he’d lost about 7,000 pounds over the years — just not all at once. “I lose 10, I gain 50,” he explained. “I lose 100, I gain 12.”  

However you do the math, Knight was significantly larger when he was annoying Jerry Seinfeld in the '90s. How did he shed the weight? “Everything that anyone could ever try,” he said. “From therapy to drugs to surgery to radiation to being taken by aliens.” Was that a reference to the Monstars from Space Jam? Stan Podolak fans hope so.

Knight tried “every single one of them — and one of them worked.” TMZ wondered which one. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

TMZ pushed Knight further, asking if he’d lost weight the old-fashioned way. It was a not-so-subtle way of asking, Is Newman an Ozempic guy? Knight didn’t bite while conceding that “not eating” is an effective tool for weight loss. He also said he used to work out until “somebody like you” — a tabloid guy with a camera phone — caught him coming out of a health club with resting bitch face. 

Knight has a point about his recent career lull. On the one hand, he’s working quite a bit according to his IMDb page, with appearances in the last few years on Bookie, That ‘90s Show and Them. But the bulk of his work is animation voices — The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Monster High, Harley Quinn — acting jobs that don’t require audiences to recalibrate their visual impression of Knight from his movie comedy heyday in the 1990s.

Character actors of all shapes rarely get a run that lasts forever, so it may be that Knight’s time as a go-to supporting man has come and gone. That didn’t stop TMZ’s airport reporter from shouting some encouragement as Knight tried to shuffle off to his gate: Give a skinny guy a shot!

Knight chuckled, repeating the mantra as he waved and walked away: “Give an old skinny guy a shot.”