Dolph Lundgren Put Stallone in the Hospital
MGM / UA
One day while filming in the UK, Sylvester Stallone wanted the fists to fly for real. Dolph punched Sly so hard in the ribs he put his costar in intensive care with a swollen heart. Lundgren literally has no memory of doing it, telling Men’s Health, “I don’t know. [Stallone] keeps talking about it, so maybe he’s right. He did go to the hospital, but I don’t know whether it was my punches or the fact that he was so overworked as the director, actor and writer.”
The film’s insurers compared Stallone’s injuries to the types seen in car crashes. “I said, ‘Well, have you seen Dolph Lundgren?” he later recounted to Entertainment Weekly. “That’s a truck. That’s a steering wheel. That’s a head-on collision.” (Luckily, he didn’t ask Dolph to blow him up for real in The Expendables.) The two have had some beef in recent years over a Drago film, but it has died down.
Dolph Lundgren Managed a U.S. Olympic team
Anchor Bay
Dolph played an East German Olympic Gold Medalist in the 1994 movie Pentathlon. After training with U.S. athletes for the role, he served as the team leader for the U.S. modern pentathlon team at the 1996 Summer Olympics. “I got involved to help save the sport, because every year there are new ones coming in and they kick out the old ones,” he told Maxim. “This is one of the oldest Olympic sports, and they thought my name could help. I was just the team manager – the guy who organizes travel.”
Dolph Lundgren Boxed a Pro Fighter
MGM / UA
Lundgren agreed to do an exhibition match against former UFC competitor Oleg Taktarov, on Russian TV, after Mike Tyson said no. Despite being 18 years older than his opponent, Dolph went five solid rounds and only lost by decision. UFC fighter Sage Northcutt expressed an interest in playing Drago’s son in Creed 2, which Men’s Journal agreed would be a great idea. (The role went to a Romanian boxer.)
Dolph Lundgren is a Marvel Movie OG
Live Entertainment
Sure, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, more than a decade in, packed with A-listers, critical acclaim, and fan love. But long before that, before the X-Men movies at Fox, before Blade, even, there was Dolph Lundgren as the Punisher. Den Of Geek looked back on the 1989 low-budget action vehicle as “the first true Marvel superhero movie.” IGN writer William Bibbiani wrote an editorial insisting “The Dolph Lundgren Punisher Movie Isn’t as Bad as You Remember.”
We’ve loved his turn as Frank Castle for years, even with the cheeseball elements, the reworked backstory, and the fact that he inexplicably isn’t wearing the vigilante’s signature skull. Filmed in Australia and co-starring Oscar winner Louis Gossett Jr., Dolph’s Punisher has some fantastic action sequences, charismatic villains, and some great lines, including a joke about a certain Caped Crusader who had his own movie released the same year.
The band Biohazard sampled one of Dolph’s monologues, words that were reportedly polished up on-set by Lundgren himself. Since then the Punisher has been played by Thomas Jane, Ray Stevenson, and standout favorite Jon Bernthal, who gets the full benefit of the prestige TV approach. But Dolph Lundgren will always be our Frank Castle OG.
Lundgren Turned Down Gladiator
DreamWorks Pictures
Dolph took a lengthy break from acting to raise his kids, but he could’ve returned sooner to be in Gladiator. He said he was offered a part as the undefeated gladiator who comes out of retirement against Maximus. Ridley Scott has said he considered Dolph, but the actor says he’d passed before Scott (or Russell Crowe) was attached.
In a 2008 interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Scott himself confirmed that Lundgren had in fact been a front-runner for the part of fighter Tigris of Gaul but was ultimately rejected because “as an actor, he just didn’t fit in with what we were trying to achieve.” The role was eventually portrayed by Danish actor and former strongman Sven-Ole Thorsen.
Dolph Lundgren Scares Real Life Bad Guys
Lionsgate
One of our absolute favorite Dolph Lundgren movies is Showdown in Little Tokyo, a buddy cop action movie with its tongue firmly in cheek that remains underappreciated. One of the coolest stories about his late co-star, Brandon Lee (The Crow), is about the time he caught a gentleman in his house in the midst of robbing him. “The guy was standing in the bedroom with the VCR in his hands,” Lee explained on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “He ended up taking a knife from the kitchen and we squared off in the living room. I ended up taking the knife away from him and the police came and took him away. After he got out of the hospital, he got two years for breaking and entering and attempted robbery.”
Dolph has a similar story, but he didn’t have to fight. He didn’t even have to be there. One night, three robbers broke into his home, tied up his then-wife, and threatened her. In the middle of it, one of them spotted a family photo and realized who her husband was; they immediately fled the scene.