DOLPH LUNDGREN IS RUNNING LATE.
When he arrives at the hotel restaurant in Stockholm, he’s in pain. He joins me straight from the chiropractor’s office, still gingerly rubbing his side. Eight weeks ago, he had surgery for an injury sustained doing karate; an injury he then aggravated by hanging in a harness for eight hours a day on Aquaman. So far, so Dolph Lundgren. Model, actor, action star, man of steel (well, iron, technically). The man who has racked up 88 acting credits in the last 33 years, including some of the most memorable action movies of our lifetime: Masters Of The Universe, Universal Soldier, The Expendables. And, of course, the film that started it all: Rocky IV. A film in which he spoke just nine lines of dialogue and instead communicated with his flat fists.
Now at 60, after struggling through PTSD, divorce and his straight-to-video decade, Lundgren is going back to where it all started, with Creed II. A counter-intuitive choice, maybe, after years of trying to become more than Drago. But, as it turns out, none of us have the true measure of Dolph Lundgren. I don’t know him at all, actually. Not really. And neither do you. Over an appropriately Swedish lunch of fish, the real Dolph Lundgren emerges. Pull up a chair and get to know him, won’t you.
We’ve seen video of you in stunt training for Aquaman. How different was it from what you’d done before?
I’d never done anything underwater — it’s called ‘dry for wet’, meaning you come into a stage that’s about five storeys up and has blue screen. They hang you in these harnesses and the cameras are on cranes. If you’re doing stunts you have to pretend to be floating and propelling yourself through the water. So it’s a lot of core — it takes strength to stay upright when you’re leaning forward. I’d had surgery five weeks before, but I didn’t say anything because I [thought, “If ] I say something they’ll cut my part down.” Afterward the stunt guys were like, “You should have told us! Because, you know, you shouldn’t be hanging in a harness for a few months...”
How did Aquaman come about?
The director James Wan was a bit of a fan of Masters Of The Universe when he was a kid… There’s a little bit of action but not much — it’s mostly Aquaman who does it. I did my second [ever] screen test. The first one was Rocky IV in 1984, and the second one was for Aquaman in 2017.
And you have Creed II coming out later this month.
Stallone sent me a text about a year ago: “What about playing Drago again? I have this idea…” Basically, my character has been in a living hell since ’85 and lost everything. Now he has a son who’s a fighter and a heavyweight and Adonis Creed moves up one category [from lightweight] and wins the title. Then we make our move to challenge him. Obviously I blame Rocky and the Russians for everything, so I’m not a very happy camper in this picture.
You’d previously said you wouldn’t want to resurrect Drago. What changed?
Well, first of all, it’s become an iconic character. People quote him and have T-shirts. I didn’t want to mess with that image. I didn’t see a way, up until now, that it would work. But obviously now when I’m old enough, suddenly I work as a parent. The father-son concept was quite good because I had a violent relationship with my dad and I know Stallone did; many men do and end up in contact sports.
You put a picture on Instagram recently with Grace Jones [Lundgren’s then girlfriend] at the A View To A Kill premiere. That’s when you were in training for Rocky IV?
Yeah, I was on set with Stallone and going out with Grace Jones. I was stuck between those two characters. Grace was great but temperamental and so was Stallone. So here I was trying to please everybody. My life changed from then… I was crazy to jump into acting with really no prospect of being anything, becoming anything. I wanted to get involved in something more emotional, more creative. Studying chemical engineering and training — hitting the bag — was okay, but it wasn’t enough, you know?
And how did you get back in the skin of Drago?
Well, first of all, the script reintroduces him as a pretty damaged character, emotionally, and somebody who’s suffered a lot physically from a hard life. I can identify with that quite easily. The physical part [and] the emotional part. I can find the parallel to my life of being looked at as a loser, about nobody believing in you and having a lot of physical pain.
What was it like that first day on set? Had you been back to Philadelphia since Rocky IV?
No. I hadn’t been back. I met the writer, the director in LA and then I worked on the character a lot. I worked on the Russian, getting back in shape. I mean, I’m always in shape, but I wanted to get a little bigger. But of course Steven [Caple Jr, director] wanted me to look old — all my clothes are like three sizes too big, my hair’s grey, my teeth are bad from the Ukrainian pollution. But when I first got to Philly it was very exciting. It was full circle for me.
Did you see Creed when it came out?
I went to the premiere. I was there with my girlfriend at the time and Stallone. I didn’t hardly know what it was about. I was sitting in the audience, suddenly realising, “Wait. Wait a second. I’m the guy who killed his father. It’s gonna be like a lynch mob in here!”
Did you have any sense of how your life was going to change with Rocky IV?
No idea. I really didn’t. I walked into the theatre as Grace Jones’ boyfriend, who people try to shoo out of the way to get a shot of her. I sat down, the lights went out, and the movie started. Then 90 minutes later they came up and everybody’s looking at me. It’s like, “What the hell?” Then outside, everybody’s taking pictures of me. Grace, it was tough for her. She met this Swedish kid, a fighter, kinda fell in love, and she was the star and I was just a nobody. Then a year-and-a-half later, two years later, I guess I’d become a movie star.
You lived together in New York. How did you find the city?
It was tough. It was dangerous. I remember
her brother, Christian, was robbed at gunpoint in the entrance to our building [in the West Village]. They took everything. I think they took his underwear, too. Then we went to a party and some guy with white hair came up to me and said, “Hey, what do you do?” “Nothing.” “Well, I’m gonna put you in my magazine.” And it was Andy Warhol. I met people like Michael Jackson and David Bowie through Grace, I’m fortunate for that. We went to Studio 54. That was kinda cool to have been there. It was an exciting phase. It was before AIDS. Grace was obviously an icon. I used to go with her everywhere. That was so crazy at the time. I remember she said, “Can you get my…” out of her purse. Maybe her lipstick. I pulled up this little gun. It looked like a toy gun, but I realised it wasn’t. It was a little Derringer, two shot, .32 caliber. I said, “Why have you got this?” “Well,” she said, “Last year I was going out with my [then] boyfriend. Some guy climbed in through the window with a gun, tied us both up, went through the whole apartment and stole everything.” I thought, “That’s not gonna be me.” So, I went out of state — because you couldn’t buy weapons in New York — I bought a 7mm Magnum and then another little pistol. I used to carry one of two guns all the time. It was one-year mandatory prison sentence then.”
You actually studied chemical engineering — was that hard to leave behind?
Well, sure. Because my dad was an engineer, my older brother is an engineer. MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] in Boston was a famous engineering school, my dad’s favourite school, and I managed to get a scholarship to go there. He was so excited. [But] I started modelling. I ran into Andy Warhol and those guys. I started studying some acting because Grace was doing it. When it was time to go back to MIT in the fall I went up there and I had Grace on the back of the bike. I went there for a few weeks and then quit.
Did you have to tell your dad?
I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know what to say. Then one time we went to some party. He opens the newspaper in Sweden and there I am, at [Studio] 54 with no shirt on, next to Grace. She’s got on one of those military hats and [was] dressed as a man or whatever it is. I think he just went, “What the hell happened to my son?!” He wasn’t too pleased. But then, to tell you the truth, I think both my parents started going, “Wow. Okay. He’s following his dream.” They kind of supported me, which was cool. He did think I’d gone nuts, though. When I went back, he told me what he knew about Grace Jones — he’d seen a video where she marches across the stage with a bunch of clones of herself. He was like, “Why don’t you find a regular girl? What’s wrong with you?”
I watched your TED talk, in which you spoke about the violence from your dad growing up. Is that what led to you being a fighter?
Yeah, I think so. As soon as I confronted my dad, when I got big enough where he couldn’t hit me anymore… he sent me off to his parents up north. Within six months, I started getting involved in ice hockey and then judo, then karate, and I think it came that way. Like many fighters, you have to have some killer instinct. Which means that if somebody hits you, you don’t even care anymore. If they break your nose, you don’t give a shit. You just wanna take them out no matter what it takes, and how long [it takes]. Really, karate, martial arts, calms you down as a person. Because you get to express it in the dojo. My therapist says, “You hijack that trauma and you use it as an actor. You use it as an athlete. It doesn’t mean that it’s gone, you still suffer from it.” Which I did for about 30 years. But I used it to become a fighter and to become an actor. Action guy.
How long were you in therapy? Was that fairly recent? Yeah, it’s recent. The reason I liked acting was because it was like another form of therapy. Your acting coach says, “Remember your dad. Use that.” But therapy started about five years ago. Because there was this other girl, a new woman. I knew that I had gotten divorced because I was drinking too much, I was having affairs, I was basically very destructive. I was making movies, but it’s called ‘escape behaviour’. Where you have trauma, you’re trying to get away from it, but you can’t. You’re trying to drink, you’re trying to sleep around, but nothing will make you feel better for more than maybe a day or an hour. Anyway, so she said, “You should try therapy.” Which I did. I don’t do it that much anymore. But, I did it every week for three or four years. He really understood what happened to me. It’s like PTSD, basically. Because you’re unsafe. So you’re in bed sleeping, but you know somebody’s gonna come beat you up for no reason. It’s like a soldier going on the battlefield. You never know if you’re gonna live through the day. Afterwards, it comes and bites you back.
Was it primarily about your dad, or about fixing yourself, or both of those things?
It was fixing myself first. I didn’t wanna lose this girl. I knew that I would probably end up doing some stupid shit that would mess it up. So that was number one. Number two, forgive my dad? Yes. That kinda follows naturally because you kinda
understand him, too, at some point. You realise what was done to him when he was a kid. He grew up back when your teacher could smack you around. I think the meditation that I started around the same time has a lot to do with the forgiveness and compassion. Actually, you start those things by forgiving people you’ve hurt, then you forgive yourself for hurting yourself, which we all do. Then you forgive people that hurt you. He was always part of mostly that last part. I know I didn’t hurt him very much, but I think he hurt me a lot. My mom too. Because I realised my mom was... I loved her, she was a really nice woman, [but] she did everything he said, she worked like a slave, and she didn’t protect me. She should’ve said, “Hey, touch him again, I’ll kill you. I’ll go to the cops.” Like some women would take the kid and leave but she didn’t, so I had a lot of... anger against her too.
Do you think we still expect men to bottle it up? Especially men who are physically very strong and represent a certain type of masculinity?
Yeah, I think we do. Sometimes you have to do that. But at the same time, when you see a grown man cry, whatever you call it, sometimes it can be very great for other men. There’s a lot of focus on women being abused and that’s great that it’s being brought up, but what about the men? What about them being beaten by their fathers, and being pressured into doing things they don’t want to do, and having a lot of angst, and having to go fight in wars and being blown to pieces and shit? I mean, there’s a lot of things that men have to endure and not say anything about it. I was even thinking about an idea for a play. You have The Vagina Monologues, [but] do something where men come on stage and say: “This happened to me.”
Of all your roles, do you have a favourite?
One of the most memorable ones would be, of course, Rocky IV,
because I was a kid and it was a big movie. By the same token, this last picture was also a great experience for me because now I’m 35 years older and playing the same guy. And then the Expendables
movies for fun, because I got to come back to the big screen.
You’d had a difficult few years before that, with a lot of straight-to-video films. Was it again just Stallone reaching out to you?
Well, I was living in Marbella because my ex-wife didn’t like LA. I was about 40 years old. It was like retiring too early, 20 years too soon. I did movies but kind of went down like this, you know? Basically I took like a 90 per cent salary cut from, say, 1997 to 2007. Around that time I get this call from Stallone about a script. I open it, turn to page three. It says, “Drunk Swede with a big knife.” It’s like, “Okay.” I got it. I read it and I thought, “Wow. This is so cool.” Stallone is a good writer. He’s so funny. The first one was very comical and all of that. Then we did those three pictures. That was the first time I’d been back on a big screen for 20 years.
You also moved into filmmaking, as a producer, director and writer.
My directing career started back in the early 2000s, like 2003.
With The Defender?
Yes. What happened was the director of The Defender got sick. They said, “We need to find a replacement quickly. Who do you think it should be?” He said, “Why don’t you ask the Hulk?” They’re like, “The Hulk? What are you talking about? What happened to you? Are you crazy?” “No, no. The Hulk is kind of smart. He worked on the script with me. I think he has some talent.” To me it’s not a big deal to direct. I don’t feel intimidated by people. I don’t feel like I can’t handle it intellectually or physically. Looking at your IMDB page, you have multiple credits every year. Are you a workaholic?
Yeah, I’m a workaholic and I have a divorce that’s about to finish soon. Some of it’s because I want to make a living and I’ve got two kids and an ex-wife and all the other stuff — a house in Marbella, a house in LA, a place here. Some of it is financially motivated and some is because, for instance, if it’s a little comedy or something, I’ll say, “Yeah, I want to try a comedy. What the hell?”
With two major films coming out within months of each other, do you feel like it’s another moment for you?
It feels pretty good. It’s exciting and a little scary because I put so much work into those characters and it was very raw for me. On Creed II, I was in tears almost every day. I hope that maybe I can show off a bit of acting ability that people can enjoy. I couldn’t have handled this five years ago. I wasn’t ready. Now I can do a scene with any actor. I can carry my own ideas through almost anybody. That’s how I feel. I can go on stage and speak. Some people do it when they’re 25 and some do it when they’re 55. It feels cool. I really hope it will open up other opportunities for me to maybe show a little more of my personality and a little less of the ass-kicking.
We can still have fights though, can’t we? No, that’s okay. I don’t mind falling back on it.
Creed II is in cinemas from 30 november. Aquaman is in cinemas from 14 december