Going the distance
DOLPH LUNDGREN talks us through the turbulent contours of his incredible career
HIS ARRIVAL WAS explosive. In the mid-’80s, Sylvester Stallone’s third sequel to Rocky needed an embodiment of Soviet might, and Dolph Lundgren — despite hailing from Stockholm, not Moscow — fitted the bill perfectly, staring down at Stallone with contemptuous cool, then upper-cutting his way through the astonishing final-reel bout. Lundgren became an instant A-lister. And though the decades ahead were, aptly enough, rocky, with times of hardship and a fallow stretch at the box office, Lundgren persists — still an ass-kicker at 64. Here, he gives us insights into his wild ride.
ROCKY IV
Competition for the role of dastardly Drago was fierce, but the unknown Lundgren wouldn’t take no for an answer, sending Stallone photos of himself in boxing gear even after being rejected for being too tall. “Finally, it was down to me and two Russian guys,” he says. “But their acting was over-the-top — they kind of did a Russian Mr. T. I decided to play him very cool. Internal. I saw the recut version the other week and it’s quite powerful. Drago comes across a little more as a human being. You realise that he was manipulated.” Rocky IV literally changed Lundgren’s life overnight, at the Los Angeles premiere on 21 November 1985. “I was with Grace Jones, who I was dating at the time, and as I walked up the red carpet, people were shooing me out of the way to take pictures of her. On the way out, people were taking pictures of me. It just blew me off my feet.”
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE
Lundgren attempted to lighten his image with this toy-inspired fantasy. But embodying
He-man wasn’t an easy experience. “It was really hard for me to go from being a Soviet bad-guy to an American hero overnight,” he says. “There was a lot of pressure. And it was kind of dicey to play a toy in those days, or any kind of character wearing a stamp for a costume.” One day on set, he had an unexpected encounter. “I was walking around between takes, all muscles and leather straps, and this hot little girl comes up to me eating a popsicle. Well, it was Madonna. She was doing a music video there and really checking me out. But nothing came about. I sent her flowers one time when I was in Cannes after that, hoping something was gonna happen, but it didn’t. You can’t win ’em all!”
THE PUNISHER & DARK ANGEL
With Masters derided by critics, Lundgren went in a new direction, dyeing his hair black for these smaller, gritter thrillers. Though both are these days regarded as cult classics (Dark Angel celebrated for Lundgren’s immortal exchange with an alien: “I come in peace”, “And you go in pieces, asshole!”), at the time they languished at the box office. “I was disappointed,” he admits. “Even though there were fights, I was trying to move out of that action space, to get away from the blond kid. Dark Angel was the first time I played a regular guy who had a girlfriend and things like that. When they underperformed, I was really upset. But I had to just toughen up and keep moving forward.”
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER
An experience Jean-claude Van Damme once described as “100 per cent pure beef”, the shoot for this pumped-up Roland Emmerich sci-fi film saw he and Lundgren get extremely competitive
as rival cyborgs. “There were scenes where we were bare-chested in the same frame, and you kind of feel pressured to work out more and be in better shape. Yeah, there was competition there.” The real rivalry turned into fake rivalry on the red carpet for the premiere in Cannes, where Van Damme engineered a pretend brawl to whip up publicity. “He cooked that up before we left the hotel,” laughs Lundgren. “He pushed me, and I pushed him back a little bit. Then one of his security guards jumped in and knocked my wife back, and I got a little pissed for real!”
THE EXPENDABLES
“When Sly called me for that film, I hadn’t been on the big screen for 15 years,” Lundgren remembers. It was a big moment for the star, after a long stretch making movies that bypassed cinemas. And an emotional reunion with the man who had changed his life once already. “I still have fun doing it, especially because of Stallone,” says the star, who will return as majestically monickered hardman Gunner Jensen in The Expendables 4. “It’s kind of a blast from the past — some British Army guy hands you an assault rifle with full blanks in it, and off you go.”
AQUAMAN
Playing the king of an underwater realm might sound like a silly lark. But for Lundgren, getting the part of Nereus was a huge deal, allowing him to flex his dramatic muscles, not just his actual ones. “It meant a lot that the director believed in me,” he says. “It was like a new beginning. In the new one I have a bigger role and I really feel part of the team. I also like the fact that a lot of the fans are very, very young — their parents maybe weren’t even born when I did Rocky IV. It’s satisfying to feel relevant.”
CASTLE FALLS
Lundgren is also an accomplished director, with six films under his belt. Command Performance was ‘Die Hard at a rock concert’; his new one, Castle Falls, sees him and Scott Adkins fighting baddies in a building rigged for demolition. “I used to direct my brothers and sisters, running around doing cowboys and Indians,” he remembers. “I get ideas from all kinds of places: Stallone, Clint Eastwood… I saw a lot of Bergman movies when I was a kid, so I started watching them after I decided to direct more.” A reboot of The Seventh Seal, with Dolph versus Death? We know who we’d bet on.