Rocky road to fame: The secret life of Sylvester Stallone, still Hollywood’s most durable action hero

Sylvester Stallone isn’t in the new Expendables movie for very long but he still gets many of its best moments. Dressed in a black beret, his character is Barney Ross, a grizzled mercenary who looks like a cross between a croissant-eating Left Bank artist and a Wagner Group veteran. We see him on souped-up motorbikes and behind the controls of planes and helicopters. He is also spotted in bars. The action ranges from US cities to Colonel Gaddafi’s old chemical plant in Libya and the middle of the ocean where a nuclear bomb is primed to go off.

When the aggro begins in the first few minutes, Stallone shirks the fighting, complaining that he has a bit of a bad back, and leaves Jason Statham, as his buddy Lee Christmas, to do the heavy lifting. Megan Fox as Lee’s CIA operative girlfriend Gina refers to him as a “caveman”, a description that he sheepishly seems to accept as pretty accurate given his age, hirsute appearance and violent lifestyle.

The filmmakers poke a little gentle humour at Stallone’s long-in-the-tooth Barney. His Samson-like powers are so diminished that he has recently lost a thumb-wrestling contest and has had to forfeit his precious Expendables ring. His friends have nicknamed him “Thumbo”, which doesn’t quite have the ring of “Rambo”.

Whatever its shortcomings, the film is yet more evidence that Stallone is the most durable action man in Hollywood. He is also the busiest with multiple new projects on the horizon.

Expend4bles certainly won’t win Stallone any acting awards. This isn’t one of his Rocky-like performances showing him going all in as the ragged but resilient underdog. It’s yet another film in which the actor sends himself up. At 77, he looks absurdly good for his age, though, and Hollywood casting agents are still giving him plum roles.

It’s a measure of the enduring affection for Stallone that he is the subject of a new hagiographical Netflix documentary about his life and career, Sly, which received its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this week.

“It’s a very, very peak and valley situation,” said the star about his many ups and downs over the last half century in a Q&A after the premiere. That is one reason why audiences have remained intrigued by him for all these years. His career has always been a giddy helter-skelter ride; monster hits are followed by massive misses, such as 1984’s dud Rhinestone, starring as a country singer opposite Dolly Parton, or 1992’s Stop! Or my Mom Will Shoot, his disastrous attempt at proving he could do light comedy as well as his arch-rival Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On and off screen, Stallone has combined brute machismo with little-boy-lost pathos. He lamented how quickly his image as the belligerent action hero became fixed in stone. “A big mistake [was] that I got caught up with the fascination of sequels,” he said. “I signed my death warrant... you’re that guy.” Of course, he was being disingenuous. Those sequels weren’t a curse. They are the main reason he is still being feted today.

Nick de Semlyen’s new book The Last Action Heroes, in which Stallone is celebrated as one of the eight stars who defined action cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, reveals how intensely Stallone bristled against being typecast as Rocky or Rambo –and yet, those are the two roles he always returns to if there is the slightest hiccup in his career.

“Partly through luck and partly through strategising, he has ended up with these characters he has managed to keep going back to over the decades... he has really leveraged these franchises in quite a clever way. Whenever anything dries up for him in other areas, he goes back and makes another one – and it pushes him back into the zeitgeist again,” De Semlyen tells me.

Stallone emerged as a movie star on the cusp of the Reagan era – and the US president became one of his biggest fans. He was from a famously humble and troubled background. It was revealing to hear the actor interviewed by his two daughters Sophie and Sistine on a 2021 episode of their podcast, Unwaxed. Even they seemed startled by his grim account of his Dickensian childhood and adolescence. “JD” were his initials in those days – short for “juvenile delinquent”. He was thrown out of every school he attended and used to skulk around on Philadelphia street corners as a teenager, smoking cigarettes.

His teachers voted him “most likely to end up on the electric chair”. He had attention deficit disorder and was considered so disruptive that he was banned from the Pennsylvania school system altogether. He keeps one of his report cards from this period. “I use it as an example. It shows that you can fail every class and still end up pretty good.”

Stallone’s story is riven with contradictions. He’s the rebellious street punk who discovered his vocation as an actor when he was packed off to prep school in Switzerland. He’s the sensitive Edgar Allan Poe-loving loner who once turned up to a press conference at Cannes Film Festival on top of a military tank.

Stallone had a youthful fascination with escapist fantasy movies such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), claiming he liked “anything that was mystical, that could take me away from where I was at the time”. His career, though, was built on playing Rocky, the journeyman boxer from the wrong side of the tracks.

“I came along at a time when the studios were imploding. They were doing musicals and these gigantic things that just were going sideways,” Stallone said of the post-Easy Riders era, in which he first began to flourish in gritty dramas about small-time fighters and bandana-wearing vigilantes.

Producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff famously took a chance on the young outcast. When he mumbled to them, after yet another failed audition, “I also write”, they looked at his Rocky screenplay, eventually green lighting it on a small budget and with him in the lead role – and The Italian Stallion won Best Picture Oscar.

In spite of the success of Rocky, the actor revealed that he was “11th choice” to play Rambo, the other character that came to define his career. Every other actor had passed because the man described in David Morrell’s book, First Blood, was such a psychopath – a deranged, homeless Vietnam veteran who killed almost everybody he encountered. Rambo would have been repulsive played by almost anyone else but Stallone managed to turn him into a figure of sympathy.

Stallone is a writer and artist as well as an actor. He still paints every day. Clocks figure prominently in his more recent work. “You get to a certain age and you become incredibly aware of time, especially where you’ve squandered it; where you’ve made the wrong choice, where you’ve gone left instead of going right in your life,” he says about his obsession with Father Time.

His daughters are somewhat dismissive of his art. One expressed bewilderment that they had one of his crude teenage drawings framed and hung up in their home. Nonetheless, there has been an exhibition of his work held in Toronto this week, to tie in with the launch of the new documentary about him.

Asked why he has so rarely previously shared his sensitive side with the public, Stallone admitted that when he was starting out in the business, he was “vocal and combative”. If he got a bad review, he would take it very personally. He deliberately projected a macho image but even then, he had a surprisingly thin skin. He took years to get over New York Times critic Vincent Canby’s dismissal of the first Rocky as “a sentimental little slum movie”.

It’s typical of Stallone’s career that at the very moment the Toronto Film Festival has been paying tribute to his artistry, one of his crudest and cheesiest action films is hitting cinemas.

The star spoke in Toronto this week of his yearning to do more “ensemble work” like James Mangold’s Cop Land (1997) – he excelled as a stumbling, small-town cop, deaf in one ear and seemingly very slow-witted. That movie, though, didn’t make much money. He complained bitterly about distributor Harvey Weinstein’s decision to open it in the height of summer when he was sure it was a winter movie. He took a reduced fee for the role and agonised that in doing so he had diminished his stock in Hollywood.

“He is really good when he does share the stage with other people [but] he hasn’t done very much of that. I think he has always wanted to be in the forefront and be the main player,” De Semlyen says of the veteran star.

The actor revealed in a 2012 interview with Canadian magazine Maclean’s that he turned down roles in two Quentin Tarantino movies, Jackie Brown (1997) and Grindhouse (2007), which Tarantino co-directed with Robert Rodriguez. “I have two daughters, and this fellow [Tarantino], his hobby is putting teenagers in his car and smashing them into a wall. That’s not going to work,” said the Rambo star about his aversion to screen violence and fears about its effect on the young. One suspects, though, that he was worried about tarnishing his A-list credentials by entering into Tarantino’s grimy B movie world.

Predictably, Stallone is still first among equals when it comes to The Expendables. Statham, Dolph Lundgren, his old sparring partner Ivan Drago from Rocky days, Fox and 50 Cent defer to him. Like John Wayne a generation before him, he isn’t ready to show weakness. You’ll rarely see him die on screen.

De Semlyen argues that Stallone’s genius may be as much as a writer as an actor. “I think he is a terrific writer. I think he is underrated,” says De Semlyen about Sly’s script work. He cites Rocky in particular as a brilliant screenplay with “a lot of nuance to it, iconic dialogue and real sensitivity. It’s first and foremost a romance between Rocky and Adrian [played by Talia Shire]. The fighting stuff is great but really it’s about the relationship between those two characters and Stallone draws it beautifully.”

Stallone is enjoying one of those periodic late surges in his career. The Expendables is back on the big screen. The new documentary about him will soon be streamed on Netflix. His Oklahoma-set crime series Tulsa King, in which he plays a Mafia “Capo” fresh out of jail, has been renewed for a second season, as has his reality TV series The Family Stallone, which shows his daily life, Kardashian-style, with his wife and daughters.

It’s little wonder Stallone sometimes looks like the cat that got all the cream. The actor is shown roaring like a wounded lion in the trailer for Sly, saying: “Do I have regrets? Hell yes, I have regrets!” But those regrets don’t seem very deep. In his own eyes, and those of his fans, he’s still the undisputed and indestructible king of the beasts in Hollywood action movies.

‘Expend4bles’ is out this week. ‘Sly’ is due to appear on Netflix in November. ‘The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage’ by Nick de Semlyen is published by Picador