Sylvester Stallone opened up about his relationship with body as an action star through the ’80s and ’90s, admitting that he “abused” himself in a “very masochistic” process to stay in shape. The mentality even extended to him using steroids and becoming bulimic while getting down to 2.6% body fat for shooting on 1982’s “Rocky III.”
“It became an obsession. Really bad. It got to the point where I became bulimic,” Stallone shared on The New York Times podcast “The Interview.” “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.
When asked directly if he was taking steroids at the time, Stallone responded with, “Oh, my god, you have to.”
“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,” the 80-year-old star continued. “I’ve abused my body. 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 … It’s come at a terrible price. 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.”
An action star through the runs of the “Rocky” and “Rambo” series, Stallone slimmed down in the ’90s to play a partially deaf, out-of-shape police officer in “Cop Land.” The role marked a significant departure for the actor, turning the page on his years as an invincible fighter on-screen.
The use of steroids by action stars has long been a topic of speculation in Hollywood, as on-screen physiques have gotten more hulking over the decades. Stars like Alan Ritchson and Frank Grillo have openly acknowledged that they’ve turned to testosterone to help them gain muscle and recover from exhausting exercises. Stallone himself shared that he used testosterone to return to the “Rambo” series in 2008, when he was then in his early sixties. But many stars that have bulked up with dozens of pounds of muscle for roles have either denied or conspicuously elided answering whether they’ve used steroids or not.
“Hollywood and professional athletics and various other mainstream professions have been lying about their usage of performance-enhancing drugs since the beginning,” Jay Campbell, an author writing on testosterone and peptide usage, told TheWrap in 2024. “It’s not politically correct or acceptable to use [chemical] agents the general public would consider as cheating, or unethical. It’s all one giant charade.”
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