The big action stars of the 80s and 90s had smaller rivalries with each other that also took place outside of their own films. In addition to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone also had another actor colleague who he was jealous of after the first meeting.
In Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone once again played the boxer Rocky Balboa, who, due to tragic events, has to compete against the Russian boxer Ivan Drago, who is known for his extremely brutal fighting. Ivan Drago is played by Dolph Lundgren.
During filming, Stallone even had to go to the emergency room because of an injury. When they first met for the film, which was released in 1985, Stallone was very jealous of the Swedish actor, as he said in an interview.
Trailer for Rocky IV – The Fight of the Century
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In an interview with The Experience With, Sylvester Stallone recounted his first meeting with Dolph Lundgren: He came into the room and I hated him. Stallone talks about how jealous he was of Lundgren’s physique. This guy skipped the evolutionary scale by about a thousand years.
He goes on to gush about Lundgren’s height, his hair, his cheekbones, his lips, and his neck and shoulder. Lundgren is not a human, more of a robot, just an extremely good-looking guy.
But it’s not his looks that Stallone praises, but also his intelligence, because Lundgren is not only an actor, he has a master’s degree in chemical engineering and even had an offer for a scholarship at MIT.
Rocky IV was only Lundgren’s second film and the first with a major role. According to Box Office Mojo, Rocky IV grossed over $300 million on a budget of just under $20 million and was a gigantic success.
Ultimately, Stallone and Lundgren remained friends after the film and starred together in The Expandebles. In Creed 2 in 2018, the two even faced each other again as Rocky and Drago and trained their successors to fight each other. Stallone and Schwarzenegger had a big rivalry going on that turned out to be pretty silly: Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to get rid of Sylvester Stallone, but 10 years later he realized how silly that was