Why Sylvester Stallone turned down Quentin Tarantino twice: “There’s no way”
When looking at the most iconic characters that Sylvester Stallone has played in his glittering acting career, it’s difficult to look beyond John Rambo and Rocky Balboa.
He first played the rags-to-riches hero Rocky in the 1976 sports film directed by John G. Avildsen, while he took on the fugitive Rambo character in 1982’s First Blood.
During an interview with MacLeans, Stallone once noted how his two most iconic characters are representative of the two opposing sides of his own personality. “Rambo is me before coffee in the morning. Rocky is me after coffee,” Stallone brilliantly said.
He continued: “Rambo has reverted into kind of like an id: primitive, reactive and instinctual, almost like an animal. I love this character because he hasn’t quite been fleshed out. He’s like an errant knight, looking to die in a glorious fashion. He has no desire to go into old age or have a family.” Indeed, John Rambo was just a pure action hero out there hiding and surviving the onslaught of the American government’s manhunt.
Rocky Balboa, meanwhile, is more of a family man who is motivated by his love for Adrian. “Rocky is the antithesis: he cannot live without family,” Stallone added. “So you’ve got the American Frankenstein monster, then you have the American Dream. In the book, Rambo gets killed. I thought it was not the proper message. There had been close to 200,000 suicides by returning Vietnam vets.”
Stallone then brought legendary director Quentin Tarantino into the mix, with whom he had conversed on the nature of Rambo’s status. He explained: “I said, ‘Why don’t we take him right to the edge without annihilating him?’ Quentin Tarantino said, ‘You’re a coward, you should have killed him!’ I said, ‘Quentin, you’re a lunatic. I want to do some sequels, brother.’”
Since making his directorial debut with the cult classic Reservoir Dogs in 1992, Quentin Tarantino has grafted his way through a truly remarkable cinematic career. His unmistakable style of screenwriting and direction creates a sense of familiarity in each of his movies, no matter how thematically disparate.
It’s made him one of the most coveted directors in all of Hollywood. There are thousands of actors absolutely desperate to work alongside the famed director; to even gain a small part in his movie is to be etched into cinematic history.
Stallone was then asked whether he had been offered to perform in any of Tarantino’s movies. He replied: “Yeah, two. The De Niro part in Jackie Brown. And Grindhouse, the part Kurt Russell did.” De Niro was brilliant in Jackie Brown, the laid-back recently-freed-from-prison counterpart to the intensity of Samuel L Jackson’s Ordell Robbie.
As for the part in Grindhouse, Stallone said that the fact that he had a family meant that he did not want to play the psychopathic character that Russell played. He added, “I said, ‘There’s no way. I have two daughters, and this fellow, his hobby is putting teenagers in his car and smashing them into a wall’. That’s not going to work.”
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