‘Rocky’: the gruelling role that pushed Sylvester Stallone to the limit
Common sense would indicate that the action genre has an age limit, with actors physically unable to pull off the intense and demanding productions once they reach a certain threshold. And yet, Sylvester Stallone keeps churning them out well into his 70s.
Since becoming a septuagenarian, the two-time Academy Award nominee has decided to try his hardest to prove that age is just a number. Most of his peers and genre contemporaries have slowed down, but the Rocky and Rambo figurehead appears adamant to show everyone he hasn’t lost a step.
Whereas old rival and close friend Arnold Schwarzenegger took a significant step back from acting for personal, professional, and political reasons to limit him to just five leading roles in action flicks in the last 20 years – two of which were Terminator sequels – Stallone has opted to do almost the complete opposite.
In the two decades since he turned 60, Sly has reprised the role of John Rambo twice more in a pair of bloodthirsty follow-ups to his other signature franchise, headlined a trio of Escape Plan films and a quartet of Expendables capers, brawled in Bullet to the Head, and dipped his toes into superheroic waters with Samaritan.
Ironically, the star claimed he was getting too long in the tooth for such rigorous undertakings in the mid-2000s when he decided to return to his signature role to make amends for the dismal Rocky V. He didn’t need to fire a gun, jump through the air, or run away from an explosion, but Rocky Balboa was nonetheless challenging for its own set of reasons.
“The training was pretty gruelling because I’m not exactly a spring chicken,” he told the BBC. “Everything you touch breaks a part of your body, so it was rough. I wanted to try and emphasise that what you see in the film, we did for real. That’s training heavy and developing a certain kind of body, which is more a beast of burden than a slick animal.”
For his efforts, Stallone suffered “bulging discs and tendon problems” to go along with breaking two toes and a metatarsal, but at least his sacrifice was worth it in the end. Rocky Balboa was a triumphant return that allowed its leading man and director to banish the ghosts of his previous swansong at long last, even if he wasn’t quite expecting it to give the ‘Italian Stallion’ a second lease of life.
Michael B Jordan may have stepped up to take top billing in Creed and its sequel, but the spinoffs would never have existed in the first place were it not for Stallone’s insistence on atoning for the sins of Rocky V. He was no spring chicken back in 2006, but here is today, still running and gunning like a man half his age.
