“It became an obsession,” Stallone says in the frequently harrowing interview. “Really bad. It got to the point where I became bulimic. 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 speak candidly about his steroid use, saying that, “nobody does it without additives and drugs, period… But you do it in a sensitive way—six weeks on, six weeks off. People go, ‘Oh, you don’t get that way naturally.’ No, you don’t. But that also took a terrible toll.” Counting out the double-digit number of surgeries he’s had on his back and neck, Stallone called the whole process “masochistic,” noting that it was only while starring in 1997’s Cop Land, “when I had to play the weakest guy in the room,” that he began to feel a release from the pressure.
Elsewhere in the interview, Stallone owns up to things like his previous “jingoistic” stances on war, which manifested in the tone of the several post-First Blood Rambo movies. (“It’s just bravado, bravado, bravado. That’s all me. You realize, flexing your muscles is a lot easier than showing your soul. And it was terrible. It was like a cartoon.”) Noting that he’s actually not the conservative he’s sometimes painted as, Stallone added that his views on war, especially, have shifted: “And now I realize all war is futile. It’s a mechanism to make tons of money for the war department and manufacturers, and these kids are just going out there into a gristmill, being chopped up, and then when they come back with no arms it’s, ‘Oh, sorry, you’re on your own.’ I hate it and I’m bitterly opposed to it. But at one time I was truly gung-ho. I don’t know if I was just trying to go against the current. In Hollywood, there’s a certain dynamic, as you know.”
You can read the full interview with Stallone—including some pretty gut-churning recollections of his childhood—here.
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