{"id":911235,"date":"2026-09-27T05:18:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T05:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/911235\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T05:18:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T05:18:12","slug":"sylvester-stallone-talks-bulimia-steroid-use-while-filming-rocky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/911235\/","title":{"rendered":"Sylvester Stallone Talks Bulimia, Steroid Use While Filming Rocky"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSylvester Stallone<\/a> is opening up about the extreme lengths he went to achieve his physique for the Rocky<\/a> franchise.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a Saturday interview with the New York Times<\/a> promoting his new memoir, The Steps, out Sept. 29, Stallone reflected on how his relationship with his body changed over the course of his career. During the height of the Rocky and Rambo franchises, the actor became known for his exceptionally muscular physique.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt became very intimate, you might say. It was my armor. 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\u2019re playing a warrior, so you\u2019d be a little bit more animalistic. You wouldn\u2019t be so smooth,\u201d he said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Stallone said it eventually became an obsession, leading him to develop bulimia while filming Rocky III.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThen it became an obsession. 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\u2019t hold anything down. Or I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t care what they say.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen asked whether he was taking steroids to achieve his physique, Stallone confirmed that he was.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOh, my God, you have to. But you do it in a sensitive way \u2014 six weeks on, six weeks off. People go, \u2018Oh, you don\u2019t get that way naturally.\u2019 No, you don\u2019t. But that also took a terrible toll,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tStallone said his relationship with his physique began to shift when he took on a different kind of role in the 1997 film Cop Land.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I did Cop Land, when I had to play the weakest guy in the room \u2014 partially deaf, overweight \u2014 that I felt somewhat liberated,\u201d Stallone said. \u201cThen things went sideways and I just fell out of grace with Hollywood. But yeah, I\u2019ve abused my body. I\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLooking back, Stallone said he no longer views his physique as the armor it once was and wishes he had treated his body differently. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf I could do it over again, I would say, \u2018Let someone else carry the banner and don\u2019t do your own stunts,’\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know what it was about hurting myself all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sylvester Stallone is opening up about the extreme lengths he went to achieve his physique for the Rocky…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":911236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75,83694,24774],"class_list":["post-911235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-rocky","tag-sylvester-stallone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=911235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/911236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=911235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=911235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=911235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}