How Sylvester Stallone’s best performance almost ruined his career: “Nobody wanted me”
Sometimes, even when ageing stars are still alive and working, it’s better to remember what they were like at their absolute peak. That definitely goes for Sylvester Stallone, who it’s far better to think of at his bloodthirsty, all-action, writer-director peak rather than standing rigidly with a frozen smile in the Oval Office next to Donald Trump.
Because in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Sly Stallone was about as cool a movie star as you could imagine. He had all the presence of a Schwarzenegger or a Bruce Willis, but he had the creativity and the film nous to go with it, going from bit parts and failed auditions to seeing a Muhammad Ali fight in person, going home and writing the draft script for Rocky in just three days.
The Philadelphia boxing movie was a revelation, catapulting Stallone from a New York jobbing actor to a Hollywood superstar, picking up ten Oscar nominations and paving the way for him to dominate the following decade with movies including Rambo, Cobra and Escape to Victory.
Such was the spirit of the ‘80s, Stallone got involved in a Hollywood rivalry with the other major action star of the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the two of them taking digs at each other in the press and trying to outdo each other with the amount of on-screen violence, guns and action. By the end of it all, they were opening up Planet Hollywood restaurants with Bruce Willis.
Smash-hit sequels followed for Stallone almost every year; Rocky II, III and IV were all massive box office successes, while the three John Rambo movies almost matched them. He also made it through the 1990s with similar success, despite a bit of a wobble with shocking efforts like the ‘comedy’ Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot, doing big business with blockbusters like Demolition Man and Cliffhanger halfway through the decade.
Then, in 1997, he appeared in the first film that seemed to reflect the fact that he was beginning to age, that he had been around for over 20 years in the industry. Cop Land needed an actor with the gravitas to go up against Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, and saw Stallone cast as a small-town New Jersey sheriff taking on the mob.
Cop Land was well received, and Stallone was roundly praised for doing something different, for a restrained performance and taking a bit of a backseat to allow De Niro to take centre stage. But Stallone struggled in the aftermath, with casting directors believing his leading man persona had taken a hit.
He recently told AARP: “Nobody wanted me after Cop Land. Even my agents. I was fired from CAA (Agency). My personal manager at the time let me go. He said, ‘I can’t do anything for you. Nobody really wants you anymore.’ And I go, ‘How’d this happen?’… I was told these studios feel as though you’re not what you were. Time has passed. Your genre is over. For almost a decade, I couldn’t find work.”
Stallone couldn’t buy a hit for almost ten years, appearing in a poor remake of Michael Caine’s gangster classic Get Carter and playing a villain in Spy Kids 3D. In the end, it was a return to where he started that brought him back, a long-awaited sixth Rocky film in 2006.
He added: “I wanted to go back to Rocky – I thought, Let me try one more, because that was my safe place. But there I am, 60 years old, and the previous one, Rocky V, was an abject failure, so the original producers didn’t want to do the sixth film. They said, basically, ‘Over our dead bodies.’ Even my wife was going, ‘I don’t know if it’s such a good idea.’”
Fortunately, Stallone didn’t listen to any of them, and Rocky Balboa proved to be a huge success with critics and audiences on release. Again, Stallone wrote, starred and directed, and the film made over $150million on a budget of less than $25m. It pushed Stallone back into movie fans’ favour and led to another Rambo movie, which also did well, and then the throwback, star-packed Expendables, which spawned three sequels across the 2010s.
