After thirty years of echoing inside Carl Weathers’ mind, Ivan Drago’s “I must break you” has somehow morphed into “I will cause him pain”.
That’s Weathers’ imitation of Dolph Lundgren‘s most famous character as performed in this great video interview. Oh well, after getting crushed by the Siberian Express back in ’85, it’s no wonder Drago’s menacing words are a bit foggy today.
Since the release of Ryan Coogler’s Creed, Weathers and Lungren have rubbed shoulders at the movie’s premiere, a thrilling sight for Rocky IV fans, but perhaps a different feeling for the actors themselves.
“It’s odd,” Weathers says of being in the same room with Apollo Creed’s killer. “That was so long ago it’s almost a faint memory. I’ve seen [Dolph] a number of times since then. We’ve kissed and made up.”
Saying Goodbye to Apollo Creed
When recalling his work in the first four Rocky films, Carl Weathers says his most difficult moment was handling the death of his character, Apollo Creed. “That was painful!” he says, “I mean, come on!”
“It was tiring, it was gruelling,” Weathers says of filming Rocky and Apollo’s fight scenes. “Of course there were times when we got hit; mistakenly most of the time. Of course it hurt, but that eventually is over and then you just go back to the hard work that we all put in to make those fights look real and believable and emotional for people. The memory is more that than anything else.”
Don’t Change the Channel!
Interestingly, even Creed himself pauses the remote when one of the Rocky films airs on television. “If I happen to be turning channels and seeing one of those movies on, I get hooked all over again,” Weathers says, “particularly the fights.”
“I don’t know why it’s so enduring,” Weathers says of the Rocky story, which now also encompasses Creed. “It just happened to be the right movie at the right time with the right people in it. Of course Sylvester Stallone wrote some great characters and a great story arc, and character arc and maybe a lot of people relate to it.” He’s got that right.
And what about seeing his character live on through a spinoff of its own? “I enjoyed [Creed] a lot, loved the performances in it,” Carl says of the movie. “Thought Stallone did the best work he’s ever done as an actor. I mean, what can you say about [Creed] except it’s a hit? It’ll probably go down with the other movies as just one of the long fantastic movies in [the Rocky] franchise.”
