At an age where the majority of his contemporaries have scaled back their on-screen physicality, Sylvester Stallone has continued pushing himself to the limit on the set of explosive action extravaganzas.
The latter stages of any veteran’s career aren’t typically associated with hefty amounts of running, gunning, jumping, and being tossed through the air, but Stallone has shown no indications that he’s willing to quietly ride off into the sunset and leave his action hero days behind.
If anything, he’s decided to up the ante after starring in four Expendables movies, three instalments in the Escape Plan series, Bullet to the Head, Backtrace, Rambo: Last Blood, Samaritan, and the upcoming Armored since turning 60 years old, even though it takes a lot longer to recover from serious injuries once the sands of time begin turning in a less favourable direction.
Almost being killed by a Dolph Lundgren punch that sent him straight to intensive care during the production of Rocky IV would have comfortably been the most notable mishap of Stallone’s entire career if it wasn’t for The Expendables, a project that included a fight scene opposite ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, who ended up breaking his neck.
Describing the brawl as “so vicious that I ended up getting a hairline fracture on my neck” per The Guardian, the star would also reveal that he “had to have a very serious operation afterwards” that resulted in a metal plate being installed to prevent any further damage in the future.
Things were never going to be light and breezy when two beefy behemoths were tasked to launch each other around with reckless abandon, although the decision not to use stunt doubles proved to be one that Stallone may not necessarily regret, but will definitely remember for the rest of his days.
Austin was completely unaware of the severity, but a call from Stallone to reassure him that it was entirely accidental prevented him from accepting the blame. The leading man may have gone out of his way to assuage his opposite number’s concerns, then, but he was a lot less forgiving of himself.
In the Netflix documentary Sly, the Rocky and Rambo figurehead was in a reflective mood when discussing his broken neck caused by The Expendables. “Truthfully, I never recovered,” he said, “It did such a number on my body. I’ve never been the same. Never”.
“Was it really worth it? Are you doing this for people’s approval?” he wondered. “Really, that’s almost like a child needing a pat on their head by their father”. Even though Stallone doesn’t think he ever returned to 100% after The Expendables incident, it hardly stopped him from signing on for a string of hard-hitting action films in the short and long term to continue taking his body to the brink.
