Sylvester Stallone has said he had bulimia while filming Rocky III.
The actor said he had an obsession with his body during filming for the 1982 boxing drama, reaching 2.6 per cent body fat and struggling to keep food down. He also admitted to taking steroids while filming.
“It got to the point where I became bulimic. You heard it here first,” Stallone, now 80, told The New York Times.
“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. And 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.”
Stallone told the New York Times that his approach to fitness was masochistic – James Drake/Getty Images
Asked whether he had been taking steroids while filming, he replied: “You have to. But you do it in a sensitive way – six weeks on, six weeks off.”
Stallone played boxer Rocky Balboa in the Rocky franchise, which he also wrote, and John Rambo, a Vietnam War veteran, in the 1982 film First Blood and subsequent Rambo movies. He became known for his muscular physique.
Speaking of his relationship with his body, Stallone said: “It became very intimate, you might say. It was my armour. I looked at Rocky: very smooth, very normal-looking guy.
“And then I said, I think the character would start to become a bit more vain. And then in Rambo, you’re playing a warrior, so you’d be a little bit more animalistic. You wouldn’t be so smooth. So I started to think: Design your body like a jaguar, a cat.
“Not big like Arnold [Schwarzenegger] but more feral and aggressive and very limber and athletic. Then it became an obsession. Really bad.”
Stallone with his wife Jennifer Flavin earlier this month – The Stewart of NY/GC Images
The actor said his approach to maintaining his physique had taken a physical toll.
“I’ve abused my body,” he added. “I’ve had nine back operations, two shoulder operations, three neck fusions. Everything is held together with baling wire, but I still want to stay in good shape.”
Stallone said he later felt “somewhat liberated” when he was required to play an overweight, partially deaf sheriff in Cop Land, released in 1997.
In the interview to promote his new memoir, The Steps, Stallone also opened up about his abusive relationship with his father, Frank Stallone, who he described as “very, very cold and tough”.
“It would be these constant bombastic explosions and then total silence,” he said. “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.”
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In 1976, Frank Stallone made a cameo appearance in Rocky’s climactic match as a bell-ringer, which Stallone described as turning “really nasty”.
“It was like: I just want you to love me for a little bit,” he said, explaining why he asked him to appear. “Like, look what I did! Share it with me. I know you thought I was a fool my whole life, but here we are.
“And of course it ended up in an altercation by the end. It got really nasty. A really bad Italian drama. But for a moment I thought, Jesus, he’d be proud.”
