When Hulk Hogan “traumatised” Sylvester Stallone on the set of ‘Rocky III’: “The hardest I was ever hit”
Before Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone’s most iconic franchise was fairly realistic and gritty in its depiction of the adventures of everyone’s favourite ‘Italian Stallion’. However, with the third entry in the series, Stallone began to bring the story outside the world of 1970s realism and into ’80s pomp and circumstance. To accomplish this, he put Rocky up against two outlandish opponents: Clubber Lang, a powerful new boxer played by Mr T, and the preposterously named Thunderlips, played by the late pro-wrestling icon, Hulk Hogan.
For Stallone, the idea of putting the bleached-blonde, handlebar-moustached, six feet seven inch Hogan in a boxing ring opposite Rocky was an irresistible visual. The grappler towered over the star, who was usually keen to disguise his five feet eight inches height on-screen. This time, though, Rocky had to look like an even bigger underdog than usual after agreeing to a charity exhibition bout against the gargantuan wrestler, so he set about extricating Hogan from his WWF duties to star in the film.
This wasn’t quite as easy as Stallone had hoped because during this period, the idea of wrestlers transferring their skills to the big screen was almost unheard of. Hogan thought he could make a deal with WWF chairman Vince McMahon to let him make the movie, but McMahon played hardball, eventually releasing him from his contract rather than letting him take time off. Either way, Hogan got to make his movie debut and wound up returning to the Federation a year later.
When it came time to shoot a fight between Rocky and Thunderlips outside the ring, though, Hogan’s inexperience with working alongside actors reared its head in a particularly destructive way. He was used to throwing burly sports entertainers around the squared circle, which is a lot more physical than outsiders to the wrestling business usually realise. However, when he brought that same energy and physicality to Rocky III, it almost ended in disaster.
“I remember a violent move where he threw me into the corner, charged across the ring like an enraged bull and leapt so amazingly high above me that his shin-bone actually came down like a giant tree on my collarbone,” Stallone once revealed on social media. The First Blood star hit the deck and was so worried that he had been seriously hurt that he didn’t look at his shoulder for ten whole minutes. “I was sure there was bone protruding through my upper chest,” he confessed.
Thankfully, this wasn’t the case, but Hogan’s rough ride didn’t stop there. Stallone claimed he sent “three men to the hospital” while shooting the scene, and the actor was left “battered and bruised” by the ordeal. Stallone claimed that being struck by Hogan was, “Truthfully, the hardest I was ever hit,” and the giant wrestler’s physicality was so devastating that the star wound up cutting the scene entirely, leaving only the in-ring confrontation between Rocky and Thunderlips. “We didn’t put it in the movie because I was so traumatised,” Stallone said, only half-joking.
Somehow, even though Hogan so thoroughly brutalised Stallone upon their first meeting, the two men still became friends. It was Stallone who inducted Hogan into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2006, in fact, and he even stuck by the embattled sports entertainer when the shameful conduct in his personal and professional life turned huge swathes of his fanbase against him in later years.
