NEED TO KNOW
40 years after Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren is revisiting the very real injury he dealt Sylvester Stallone in the boxing ring.
Lundgren, who played the iconic movie villain Ivan Drago in the fourth Rocky movie, recalled in a recent interview with Fox News that he did not realize that he had seriously injured Stallone, now 79, during filming for the boxing scenes between Drago and Sylvester’s title character until well after the scene in question began filming.
“I didn’t know it happened, we were both getting hit in that fight,” Lundgren, now 68, said. “We shot for two weeks in Vancouver, and I got back to L.A. … the producer called and said, ‘Hey, Dolph, you got two weeks off.’ I said, ‘That’s great, what’s going on?’ ‘Sly’s in the hospital.’ I found out that way.”
“I did feel a little guilty,” Lundgren added. “You know, he hit me too. He was the boss, I did what he told me, which was good. Go really hard with the body, you know those Russian uppercuts. I don’t know if it was my body or exhaustion or my punches, I don’t know, but he did get hurt. I’m sorry about that.”
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Stallone, for his part, recalled in a 2021 documentary that he made titled The Making of Rocky vs. Drago that he was flown to an intensive care unit from Canada to California after Lundgren “pulverized” him while filming the fight scene.
“I didn’t feel it in the moment but later that night my heart started to swell,” Stallone said at the time. He spent four days in the intensive care unit. “My blood pressure went up to 260 and I was going to be talking to angels, next thing I know I’m on this emergency, low-altitude flight. I’m in intensive care surrounded by nuns and then after that, I had to go back and finish the fight.”
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Rocky IV follows Stallone’s Rocky Balboa as he prepares for a fight with Lundgren’s Ivan Drago, a Russian boxer, after Drago brutally beats Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in a separate match that ultimately kills Creed. The boxers go toe-to-toe in a grueling fight at the climax of the movie that results in a win for Rocky.
As Stallone said in the 2021 documentary, the punch that Lundgren injured him with is what audiences saw in the actual movie. “How could you take that out?” he said at the time.
