In a new interview, Sylvester Stallone admitted to using steroids, implying that his physique in movie franchises like Rambo and Rocky would not have been possible without them. And now he is paying for it.
“It became an obsession. Really bad,” Sylvester Stallone said on The Interview podcast by the New York Times. “It became to the point where I became bulimic. You didn’t know that? Okay, you heard it here first.
“I got down to 2.6% 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 that staying at that point of fitness. And then finally I just broke the cycle, but it got to me, literally an obsessive body worship kind of a thing.”
Stallone said using steroids was something he felt he had to do for the roles he played
Stallone also talked candidly about his use of steroids during that time, claiming that it was essential to maintain such a body while severely restricting his diet and exercising.
“Oh, my god, you have to,” he said in response when questioned whether he had used steroids, adding, “Nobody does it without additives and drugs, period. I don’t care who they say, bulls—.
“But then again, it isn’t as though you’re a junkie,” he continued. “But if you’re going to put on, if you’re going to work and try to stay in shape for 6 months straight and you’re you’re eating yogurt and pudding and it’s not happening.
“But you do it in a sensible way. Six weeks on, six weeks off. And people go, ‘Oh, you don’t get that way naturally.’ No, you don’t. You don’t unless you’re just a freak of nature. So everyone who says it – I can see them a mile away. You know, what is obvious. But that also took a terrible toll. Terrible toll.”
Calling it his “armor,” Sylvester Stallone said that as the Rocky movies progressed, he thought that “the character would start to become a bit more vain.”
“And for Rambo, you’re playing a warrior; you’ll be a little bit more animalistic,” he said. “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.”
Doing his own stunts for years also took a toll on his body
Now, at 80-years-old, Sylvester Stallone says he no longer sees his body as his “armor,” but he is still “sort of fit,” however, it takes “a lot of pills to keep going.”
He places a lot of blame for that on doing his own stunts for so long. Stallone says he has had nine back operations, two shoulder operations, three neck fusions, and “everything is held together with baling wire.”
“It’s come at a terrible price,” he said. “If I could do it over again, I would say, ‘Let someone else carry the banner and don’t do your own stunts.’ I don’t know what it was about hurting myself all the time.”