The role that sent Chuck Norris into Hollywood exile: “I don’t play in movies like this”
As hard as it may seem to believe for the generation raised on social media and the 24-hour cycle of short-form bombardment, back when the internet was a much simpler place and less of an endlessly hostile cesspool, Chuck Norris was the biggest viral sensation on the planet, bar none.
All it took to elevate the 1980s action star to legendary status online was to dictate nonsensical facts that espoused his boundless toughness. Things were simpler back then, when folks did little else but yell Anchorman quotes at each other and rattle off the most ridiculous Chuck Norris factoids they could find.
Chuck Norris’ favourite Chuck Norris fact was that they wanted to put him on Mount Rushmore, but the granite wasn’t tough enough for his beard, and things reached their metatextual peak when the veteran was dusted off and added to the ensemble cast of The Expendables 2, where he was scripted to deliver a Chuck Norris fact.
He informed Sylvester Stallone and the gang that he was once bitten by a king cobra, and after three days of excruciating pain, the cobra died, sending Norris’ internet fame crashing through the fourth wall. If you’d told someone in the ’80s who’d been raised on action flicks that he’d share a cast with Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Dolph Lundgren, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, they’d have probably fainted.
However, the martial arts expert and terrible actor wasn’t entirely thrilled with the end result. The shoot ’em up sequel was his first onscreen credit in seven years, but after it had been released, Norris disappeared for another 12, and it might have had something to do with his dissatisfaction toward the picture.
“In Expendables 2, there was a lot of vulgar dialogue in the screenplay,” he said. “For this reason, many young people wouldn’t be able to watch this. But I don’t play in movies like this. Due to that, I said I won’t be a part of that if the hardcore language is not erased. Producers accepted my conditions, and the movie will be classified in the category of PG-13.”
A noble sentiment, or it would have been had The Expendables 2 not been R-rated. Stallone confirmed “the PG-13 rumour was true” before it was released, but something had clearly changed by the time the creaking action heroes of yesteryear returned to drop bodies, trade woeful one-liners, and turn the air blue in a fashion that Norris absolutely would not approve of.
As anyone who was chronically online in the mid-2000s can attest, lying to Chuck Norris was one of the riskiest gambits imaginable. He voiced his objections to the profanity, and he claimed the producers had bent to his will, but when it hit cinemas, it was slapped with an R-rating. He didn’t have any problems with mowing down hundreds of goons, but heaven forbid somebody said a naughty word.
It would be another dozen years before he returned to the screen again, the longest exile of his acting career by some distance, not that many people even noticed he even made a comeback in 2024’s Agent Recon.
