The big action stars of the 80s and 90s had smaller rivalries among themselves, which were also played out outside their own movies. In addition to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone had another acting colleague whom he was jealous of after their first meeting.
In Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone once again played the boxer Rocky Balboa, who must face the Russian boxer Ivan Drago due to tragic events, known for his extremely brutal fighting style. Ivan Drago is played by Dolph Lundgren.
During filming, Stallone even had to go to the emergency room due to an injury. However, at their first meeting for the film, which was released in 1985, Stallone was very jealous of the Swedish actor, as he recounted in an interview.
In an interview with The Experience With, Sylvester Stallone spoke about his first meeting with Dolph Lundgren: He came into the room, and I hated him.
Stallone describes how jealous he was of Lundgren’s physique. This guy skipped the evolutionary scale by about a thousand years.
He continues and raves about Lundgren’s size, his hair, his cheekbones, his lips, and his neck and shoulders. Lundgren is not a human, but rather a robot, just an extremely good-looking guy.
But not only his looks are praised by Stallone, but also his intelligence, as Lundgren is not just 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 larger role. According to Box Office Mojo, Rocky IV grossed over 300 million dollars on a budget of just under 20 million dollars and was a gigantic success.
Ultimately, Stallone and Lundgren remained friends after the film and starred together in The Expandebles. In Creed 2, the two even faced each other again as Rocky and Drago in 2018 and trained their successors for a fight against each other. Stallone and Schwarzenegger had a big rivalry going, which turned out to be quite silly: Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to get rid of Sylvester Stallone, but 10 years later he realized how silly it was
