Sylvester Stallone recalls ‘really nasty altercation’ with his father on set of iconic drama
Sylvester Stallone recalls ‘really nasty altercation’ with his father on set of iconic drama
Annabel NugentSun, September 27, 2026 at 11:35 AM UTC
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Sylvester Stallone has recalled a “nasty altercation” with his father on the set of Rocky.
Stallone, 80, spoke about his tricky relationship with his father Frank Stallone Sr in a new interview with The New York Times to promote his forthcoming memoir The Steps, published in the UK on 29 September.
The three-time Oscar nominee said that he had landed his “tough” father a cameo as the bell ringer in the 1976 film’s climactic match, which sees his Rocky go up against Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed.
“It was like: I just want you to love me for a little bit,” Stallone said. “Like, look what I did! Share it with me. I know you thought I was a fool my whole life, but here we are.”
On the day that they shot the scene, however, Frank Sr did not ring the bell “properly” and allowed his son to keep “fighting and fighting and fighting”.
“Everything’s choreographed. It’s one, two, three, four, bell. Not six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Carl Weathers is like, ‘What’s going on?'” recalled Stallone.
“And of course it ended up in an altercation by the end. It got really nasty,” he said. “A really bad Italian drama. But for a moment I thought, Jesus, he’d be proud.”
Regardless, Stallone won an Oscar for his lead performance in Rocky – a film that would spawn several sequels and a spin-off franchise led by Michael B Jordan.
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Sylvester Stallone poses with posters of the film ‘Rocky’ (AFP/Getty)
Elsewhere in the interview, the actor described his father as “very, very cold and tough”.
“It would be these constant bombastic explosions and then total silence,” recalled Stallone of living with his dad as a child. “If he and I were talking and I said, ‘I don’t know if I agree with that,’ he’d start spinning his fork and suck his teeth, and you knew what was coming.
“The next thing you know, wham! He had very big hands. You learn to duck. I didn’t put a lot of stuff in the book because I didn’t want a pity party, but it was insane.”
He did share, however, that he and his father shared a moment of “love” on his deathbed in 2011 after Frank Sr was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in ‘Rocky’ (1976) (Amazon MGM Studios)
Elsewhere, Stallone spoke about his struggles with bulimia, revealing that he suffered from an eating disorder following the success of Rocky.
“So I started to think: Design your body like a jaguar, a cat. Not big like Arnold, but more feral and aggressive and very limber and athletic. Then it became an obsession. Really bad. It got to the point where I became bulimic,” he said. “You heard it here first.
“I got down to 2.6 percent body fat when I was doing Rocky III, and I couldn’t hold anything down. Or I didn’t want to keep it down because I became so obsessed with staying at that point of fitness, literally an obsessive body-worship kind of thing.”
Stallone went on to say that he was also taking steroids during that time, stating: “Nobody does it without additives and drugs, period. I don’t care what they say. It isn’t as though you’re a junkie, but if you’re going to work out and try to stay in shape for six months straight, and you’re eating yogurt and pudding, it’s not happening.”
The actor said he felt “somewhat liberated” from his obsession with his body when he was cast in 1997’s Cop Land “as the weakest guy in the room”.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
