14 DAY TRIAL // When Sylvester Stallone announced that he wrote and would be directing and starring in yet another action movie in the vein of the productions that made him an international action movie icon, many thought he was joking. Coming to prove to the world that, in extraordinary circumstances, 60 can be the new 30, Stallone went ahead and started working on the film, called “The Expendables.” It wasn’t without a price, though, as he reveals in an interview cited by the Herald Sun.
Apparently, having to do so many fight scenes with opponents that are a good match for Stallone both in size and strength, like Dolph Lundgren, Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, eventually took a toll on the sexagenarian’s body and he ended up with a broken neck. Though he never talked of this to the media, Sly reveals now that the injury was so bad he had to undergo surgery immediately and have a metal plate inserted in his neck.
“Man, it was seven guys, kicking each other’s [expletive], one guy tougher than the next. No joke, our stunt guys were begging for mercy. Actually, my fight with ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin was so vicious that I ended up getting a hairline fracture in my neck. I’m not joking. I haven’t told anyone this, but I had to have a very serious operation afterwards. I now have a metal plate in my neck,” Stallone says in a recent interview, as cited by the Herald Sun.
It’s a known fact that, for “The Expendables” at least, Stallone did most of his own stunts, which was obvious from the first shots snapped by the paparazzi on the set in Brazil. As such, it’s perhaps not that much of a surprise that he came to be so seriously injured, though this fracture is perhaps nothing compared to the injury Stallone sustained while shooting with Lundgren (who also appears in “Expendables”) for “Rocky IV.”
“At one point, he hit me so hard on the head I felt my spine compress. He then hit me with an almighty uppercut. That night my chest started to swell, and I had to be helicopter-ambulanced from my hotel to a nearby emergency room. I was told that Dolph had punched my rib cage into my chest, compressing my heart. If it had swollen any more, I would have died. After that, I was like, ‘Dolph, it’s only a movie, bro’,” Stallone once said about how he and Lundgren had tried to make the fight scenes in the movie more believable by actually fighting.