The Sylvester Stallone/Steven Seagal fight that almost was: “I slammed him up against a wall”
Steven Seagal is not a very nice man.
As well as poisoning the world with some truly horrible movies, the controversial martial artist has also been caught in more than a few personal scandals.
He’s been accused of sexual misconduct by numerous women, is an ardent supporter of Vladimir Putin and his imperialist ventures, and was once sued for sexual trafficking, although that claim was later removed. Ask anyone who’s worked with the guy, and they’ll tell you just how unpleasant he can be.
You could make an entire list of actors who despised working with Seagal. In fact, we did. He seems to rub his fellow action heroes up the wrong way, including a man with whom he shares a set of initials, Sylvester Stallone. Sly was on a recruitment drive for his Expendables series when he and Seagal butted heads. Given that the franchise’s entire premise is faded action heroes teaming up for one last payday, you’d have thought this would have been a match made in heaven. Alas, it wasn’t.
According to Yahoo, Seagal immediately shot down the idea of joining the series. “I just (don’t) like some of the people involved,” he said. “Life is too short to work with funny people. There’s good and bad people everywhere and a lot of people in The Expendables I like too. So it’s okay.”
Oh, but it wasn’t OK. Not happy at being spurned by one of the biggest assholes in Hollywood history, Stallone quickly escalated things.
“I slammed him up against a wall,” revealed the star of First Blood. “At that time, our testosterone was running full bore. He was full of his height and I was full of… Myself. But we made up. He can be very abstract.”
It’s important to remember that Stallone is no saint either. He isn’t averse to the odd controversy and is extremely pally with Donald Trump, serving as the president’s ‘Special Envoy to Hollywood’ since 2025… whatever that means. He’s also not averse to getting into on-set scraps. While making The Expendables, he fell out so badly with Dolph Lundgren that the co-stars almost came to blows. Kirk Douglas actually did punch him on the set of Oscar, although that was because he wanted to test himself against the guy who played Rocky.
Across the four Expendables movies, almost everyone who fronted an action movie in the 1980s and 1990s has made a cameo. Seagal is arguably one of the biggest absences, but he’s made it very clear that the series isn’t for him. Either he sees himself as above it, which would be hilarious, or his beef with Stallone is strong enough to have put him off entirely. Jean-Claude Van Damme, whom Seagal also dislikes, was hired to play the villain of the second film. Was this a dig at the Under Siege star? Or just the first name at the top of Stallone’s contacts list?
While we may never see Seagal and Stallone go head-to-head on screen, action buffs can rest easy knowing that the pair actually threw down for real. If only there’d been a camera present.
