THE TEAMMATE
Predator (1987)
“DILLON! YOU SUNUVABITCH.” The sweaty slap of palm on palm. The swell of gigantic, vein-mapped biceps straining against fabric. Were a study to be commissioned, it’s likely scientists would conclude that Weathers’ arm-wrestle with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the opening minutes of Predator contains the highest concentration of pure testosterone ever recorded. An absurdly macho display, it is a scene charged with so much masculine energy, rumour has it every living creature within a five-mile radius spontaneously grew a moustache. But Weathers’ contribution to John Mctiernan’s iconic rumble in the jungle was far more than just giving Arnold someone to flex with.
While the majority of Predator’s henchmen were lesser-known faces, Weathers set combatbooted foot in the fictional jungle of Val Verde a bona fide movie star. Riding high off the back of four Rocky films, he drew even more glances from the locals than his Austrian co-star. But Apollo Creed didn’t come cheap, Mctiernan having to stare down Fox bean-counters in order to recruit Weathers for the mission. “It was really a way to help Arnold,” recalled Mctiernan in 2020. “Arnold had most of his scenes with Carl Weathers, and acting is really reacting. If you can play a scene with somebody who’s really good, they make you good.”
So Weathers tooled up. Alongside wild man Sonny Landham, Wrestlemaniac Jesse Ventura, Commando’s Bill Duke, former Marine Richard Chaves, and scrawny screenwriter Shane Black, he strapped on a machine gun and followed Schwarzenegger’s Dutch into hell. As company man Dillon, he shouldered the film’s most nuanced role: Dutch’s friend, who sells him out for a political agenda, only to embark on a redemption arc that results in him sacrificing his own life for a virtual stranger. Weathers brought a dignified nobility to the part, one that could easily have been reduced to a weaselly cypher in less capable hands. In a platoon of none-more-swole bros, Weathers stood out — despite packing the movie’s weediest gun.
Mctiernan’s Schwarzenegger gambit also paid off, Arnold gravitating towards his co-star and raising his game to meet the bar Weathers set. “Every time Carl was working, Arnold was over in the corner of the set, watching,” said the director. “I never had to say a word. I just put Carl in Arnold’s way, and it worked out. Arnold’s performance in that was better than in any of the movies he’d done before.”
In the frame, he elevated every scene. Outside it, he trolled his co-stars with spectacular verve, breaking into Arnold’s private gym before dawn to pump iron, then insisting his bulging physique was a Reacher-like gift of genetics. After hours, he would lead the charge, too, tearing it up at Puerto Vallarta night spot La Jungla (literally ‘The Jungle’), where he’d bust moves to James Brown’s ‘Living In America’, driving the Mexican crowd wild. In a film that redefined the term ‘manpower’, Weathers was The Man. And while Old Painless might be the showstopper, Carl Weathers remains Predator’s secret weapon.