Category: 2013

On January 31, 2013, The Independent posted a short interview with Sly that they call The Sly Wisdom of Action Hero Sylvester Stallone.  If you’re a Stallone fan, you should check it out.  Here’s a small taste…

You’re sporting some impressive tattoos in your new film Bullet To The Head. Are they real?  They’re real – unfortunately. I have all kinds of chest injuries; I tore my vein duringRocky II and had 60 stitches. If you’ve seen Rocky Balboa, you’ll know how bad they look. It got worse and worse, and people were saying, “Urgh, has he got varicose veins?” So I thought, f*ck it, and covered them with a tattoo of my wife. Then the tattoo started to grow and it went to a skull and before I knew it, I was a mural.

The film is based on a graphic novel – were you a fan?  Yeah, but in the novel my character was a little more sadistic and crazy, with no redeeming qualities. So I changed that and I cut the goatee off because he looked exactly like Barney from The Expendables.

Do you think your acting skills are underappreciated?  I didn’t work my way through certain acting establishments or Bafta or, what do you call it? Royal… [puts on hoity-toity English voice] Rada! It’s been a real grind. I never really learned how to act; it was on-the-job training.

Given that your films have taken $1.6bn at the box office, does it annoy you that you don’t get the respect you deserve from Hollywood?  It did, it did. But there’s a different kind of recognition now – from the people. There’s an eclectic, sophisticated sort of recognition. I used the challenge of Cop Land to prove a point. Now I go, “OK, I can do those kind of movies. Now let’s see you guys do an action film.”

Have you ever fallen out with any of your fellow Eighties action heroes?  Steven Seagal said that he “didn’t associate with that kind of element” – meaning me. So I slammed him up against a wall… At that time, our testosterone was running full bore. He was full of his height [Seagal is 6ft 3in, Stallone is 5ft 10in] and I was full of… um… myself. But we made up. He can be very abstract.

On January 29, 2013, AM New York posted a short interview with Walter Hill.  Here’s some of what he had to say about Sly…

Sly and I, we have known each other a long time. I met Sly the first time before “Hard Times” came out [in 1975] and before he had done “Rocky.” He and I had and still have the same lawyer. We were introduced way back then. I’d sent him scripts a couple times to try and tease him out and get him to do something. He’d done the same with me, and it just never quite [worked out] – whether it was time and circumstance, or whatever. But I’ve always admired him.

I came out of the experience of those films really on a positive basis with all these guys. At least when I run into them, they’re very nice to me, so it seems OK. The first premise is they have a great gusto for the genre … Bruce and Sly are much more alike than Arnold is. Arnold’s hard to define. I always thought whatever you said about him, there were always these other things that were true … Bruce and Sly are both trained actors. They’ve gone through the process, they learned, they studied, they went out, they tried, they were rejected, they failed, they succeeded marginally and then they succeeded and then they became gigantic successes. Whereas Arnold was a world figure before he ever did a movie.