Sylvester Stallone has spent five decades building an image of invincibility on screen, but in a new interview with The New York Times tied to his memoir, the 80 year old actor revealed a struggle he had never discussed publicly. He talked about his abuse of PEDs while sculpting his body for roles like Rocky and Rambo.
Stallone explained that his physique was never a fixed thing but something he redesigned for each character.
“It became very intimate, you might say. It was my armor,” he said. “I looked at Rocky, very smooth, very normal looking guy. And then I said, if we move on, you have to, I think the character would start to become a bit more vain. And then if Rambo, you’re playing a warrior, you’d be a little bit more animalistic. You wouldn’t be so smooth. So I started to think, design your body like a jaguar, a cat. Not big like Arnold, but more feral.”
That pursuit of a leaner, more predatory look for Rocky III spiraled into something he could not control.
“And then it became an obsession, really bad,” Stallone said. “It became to the point where I became bulimic. Yeah, you didn’t know that. Okay, you heard it here first.”
He described the physical toll of chasing single digit body fat for the film’s opening scene.
“Because I was like, you know, you would eat. I got down to 2.6 body fat when I was doing Rocky 3 in the opening scene. Literally like hollow… And I couldn’t hold anything down, or if I did, I didn’t want to keep it down cause I wanted to, I became so obsessed at staying at that point of fitness.”
Stallone also acknowledged, without naming specific compounds, that reaching that sort of body required more than diet and training.
“If you’re going to work and try to stay in shape for six months straight and you’re eating yogurt and pudding, it’s not happening.” Asked directly whether he used roids, he answered, “Oh my god, you have to.”
He added that he approached it cyclically, “six weeks on, six weeks off,” and was dismissive of claims to the contrary from other bodybuilders and actors. “People go, oh, you don’t get that way naturally. No, you don’t. You don’t unless you’re just a freak of nature.”
He said the habit took a terrible toll that went beyond the physical.
Playing an weak, partially deaf character in “Cop Land” marked a turning point, one he said left him somewhat liberated from years of what he called body worship.
Now decades later, carrying nine back operations, two shoulder operations and three neck fusions, Stallone views the era with regret.
“If I could do it over again, I would say let someone else carry the banner. Don’t do your own stunts,” he said.
