FEW FIGURES HAVE shaped our perceptions of the male physique (and modern masculinity at large) like Sylvester Stallone. Exploding onto the screen in the Rocky and Rambo franchises, Stallone’s characters were invariably emotionally detached, morally straightforward and perhaps most importantly: looked like they were carved from marble by Michelangelo himself.
With voluminous muscles, an imposing stature and shockingly low body fat percentage, Stallone’s physique became something every man aspired to. But in an interview with the New York Times while promoting his new memoir The Steps, the actor has revealed that it wouldn’t have been possible without steroids.
“Oh, my god, you have to,” the actor said when asked if he has used steroids. “But 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.
“Nobody does it without additives and drugs, period. I don’t care what they say,” he continued. “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.”
While the impact of Stallone’s physique is undeniable, he admits that building it “took a terrible toll,” plunging him into depression and a struggle with bulimia as he got down to 2.6 per cent body fat.
“I looked at Rocky: very smooth, very normal-looking guy… And then in Rambo, you’re playing a warrior, so you’d be a little bit more animalistic. You wouldn’t be so smooth,” Stallone recalled. “So I started to think: Design your body like a jaguar, a cat. Not big like Arnold, but more feral and aggressive and very limber and athletic. Then it became an obsession. Really bad. It got to the point where I became bulimic.
“I got down to 2.6 percent body fat when I was doing Rocky III, and I couldn’t hold anything down,” Stallone continued. “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.”
It took until 1997’s Cop Land, a role that wasn’t dependent on rippling muscles, that the pressure to look a certain way started to ease. “It wasn’t until I did Cop Land, when I had to play the weakest guy in the room – partially deaf, overweight – that I felt somewhat liberated,” Stallone said.
For all the fame it has brought him, Stallone is honest about the costs. “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’”, he said. “I don’t know what it was about hurting myself all the time.”
