There’s a scene in Rocky IV that will tell you everything you need to know about Carl Weathers as a performer. It arrives minutes before Rocky’s nemesis-turned-ally Apollo Creed is sent to the big boxing ring in the sky.
The former world champion (Weathers), now retired, is about to go toe-to-toe with the hulking, 'roided-up Soviet Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). As Drago awaits his opponent at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, “Living In America” begins to bleed out of the speakers and James Brown – the actual James Brown – appears in front of the ring, jiving alongside some burlesque dancers and a full band. As the song shifts into its chorus, Creed pops up on a balcony in front of a giant mechanical goat’s head in a matching Star-Spangled Banner shorts and waistcoat combo and an Uncle Sam hat, dancing and taunting Drago, before making his way down to the ring. The scene drags on for almost four minutes, as his opponent glares at him with a look that says, “I’m going to kill this guy,” and he does.
It is camp, absurd, extremely over the top – everything you’d expect from a boxing movie about the Cold War – and, on a rewatch, very funny, knowing what’s coming next. Weathers' charisma, his physicality and his sense of humour, which brought some much-needed personality to the original Rocky films, make it fizz with energy. Very few could pull it off; he does so easily.
Now, 35 years after that movie was released, and 50 into his remarkable career, Weathers is conquering the next frontier, as one of the stars of Disney’s The Mandalorian. Despite his mobility having been limited by the wear and tear of time and an injury he picked up on the set of Happy Gilmore – of all places – he's still an action star at heart. In the latest episode, which he also directed, he's running down hallways and fending off Stormtroopers like a man half his age. He looks right at home.
Over Zoom, his booming voice dulled only slightly by weak laptop speakers, he speaks to GQ about the injury he has been carrying since the 1990s, Baby Yoda and “grab-assing” with Arnold Schwarzenegger on the set of Predator.
How have you been, with everything that’s going on in the year 2020?
My attitude about so many things, including this pandemic, is one day at a time, man. If we get too ahead of ourselves or if our regimen is one that has had us running around all the time and somehow looking to be bombarded with all this input all the time, I don't know how you could survive this. It's suddenly being sequestered away and having less contact face-to-face with people. It's probably really strange to some people. But personally, I like time to myself. And I like to choose when I'm going to have my bandwidth filled and then try to drain it a bit.
Werner Herzog said that he shed a tear when he saw Baby Yoda. What was your reaction when you first saw the puppet?
I didn't shed a tear, but, man, I was... There was something so sweet about that little character. You know, people have told me who have watched The Mandalorian how much they loved the baby. How could you not want to be in scenes with the baby?
You were a major movie star in one of the biggest periods of cinematic history. The 1970s and the 1980s are, to some, the high watermark of cinema. Being at the forefront of this Disney+ show, which is going straight into people's homes, how do you feel about that transition and about TV now as a prospect, compared to the 1970s and 1980s, when it was considered a step down?
Yes, you're right that there was a negative feeling about television in the 1970s and the 1980s, among anybody who'd done movies and had success, that going into television was going to be somehow detrimental to their career. And before that it was even worse. There was no thinking about being a movie star and going “into television”. Over the years I think what the industry discovered, and what many actors discovered as well, was that television in its own way expanded their fanbase, expanded their career, gave them an opportunity to reach people that perhaps they would never have reached, because television is right there in front of you. Television is like driving a car as opposed to a Conestoga wagon across the expanse.
In the past, you’ve made a distinction between being a movie star and being an actor. Can you explain what the difference is?
What I think I was alluding to was that this label of movie star doesn't really have anything to do with being a really fine actor or artist. Enough promotion of any person, enough movies where that person gets to be shown in a particular light, can make them a movie star. That doesn't mean their chops are there as an actor to play a character that is perhaps unlike them, with complicated ideas behind the dialogue, behind the discourse, where a writer has really investigated something and you as the actor have to pull out this performance that not only illustrates what that writer wanted to say and create, but exemplifies what kind of talent you really have. As a movie star you don't really have to have that. All you really need is to be photogenic, you need the right projects and you need a lot of promotion behind it. Movie stars can be made. Actors, that's a whole other ball game.
Can you give me an example of whom you might classify as a movie star and not an actor?
Oh, now you want to throw me under the bus! Oh, that's funny. No. Let's just say this. There are many, many, many fine actors and some of them also happen to be movie stars. There are not that many movie stars who also happen to be actors. You can look at the strength of their careers, the length of their careers and the kind of movies that they've been in. Let's suffice it to say there is a difference.
What has changed about action movies since the 1980s? Can action stars exist in the same way in 2020 as they did in the 1970s when you, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were running the place?
I think it's really challenging today. And what is challenging is that to have an actor who is... the only word that comes to mind is cerebral, who can figure things out and work things out in their mind and then translate that into how they behave on screen and deliver a performance, and accompany that with someone who is also physical. The cerebral and the athletic somehow come together and this talent displays both, you need the right vehicle. That was in the 1970s, maybe the 1980s. Today, these movies are really extravaganzas. They're not necessarily about someone who is uber physical. I think we had a short run there with the Bond movies and if you look at the last three or four, wow, the physicality is amazing. Now, granted, a lot of that is stunt people doing that work, but when you watch that and you saw Craig running, that was Craig running. And he looked like he could run.
What is the itchiest situation you've ever been in on set? I read that you and Dolph Lundgren got into a scrape on the set of Rocky IV...
I love those stories when they're made up, you know. It's kind of great fodder for publicity. You get the audience interested and all that. But Dolph is just a sweet guy. And I like to think I am as well. Despite what it has looked like on screen. No, we worked really well together and I've seen Dolph so many times since then. He's just as generous today as he was then. And I think more than anything else, he played that character extremely well. And coupled with the over-the-top Apollo Creed, his mechanised Russian made for all kinds of great stories that were planted by god knows whom. Makes for good reading, let's put it that way.
It was hard to escape taking punches on set. There were times when intentionally we went at each other. I was always concerned that if I hit Sly, threw a punch right, it might hurt. And there was no reason for that. And I think he was pretty much the same way. But there were times when we did get hit. You know, fatigue and slipping would occur and you'd just go, “Wait a minute, man. Another one of those and you're gonna get something back. And it won't be fun what I throw back." So there were moments like that, of course. But none of it was intentional, unless it was supposed to be intentional.
When we shot the fights in the first and second movies, we were doing eight to ten hours a day for eight days, and I'm telling you that is exhausting. You get yourself worked up and hot and sweaty and loose and you wait for them to reset the cameras and do another take, your body is going hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold, and that's the place where you get injured. You really have to stay warm. And fortunately in your twenties you can sustain a lot of that and stay OK, but not always.
Is it true you picked up a serious injury on the set of Happy Gilmore?
Yeah, that's true. I didn't tell anyone because, you know, I'm tough, man. Yeah I hurt my back and actually, to this day, it still really bothers me, because it was right on the spine.
It was a blind fall. There are stunt bags, which, maybe are like two feet tall. But the bag wasn't pushed all the way against the wall, so when I went out backwards instead of hitting something flat, my body kind of got trapped, my head on the bags, and my tailbone at the wall, and so it just would crunch on the spine. I felt the pain and the burning sensation immediately. But again, I'm an athlete, I'm tough, I'm an actor, let's keep going. And after about three or more of those, I said, “No more of that.”
I didn't know it until years later, but I fractured two vertebrae and osteophytes grew out and connected and it did a kind of self-fuse in a really bad place. There were three or four years there where I was just in excruciating pain. And somehow, I was going to a doctor and getting treatment and then I went to another doctor and, finally, after I thought I was exhausted with what to do, I started to look into surgeons and I was told by one of the heads of surgery at one of our very fine hospitals in Los Angeles, “You don't want us to touch that. We can only make it worse.” I went, “How am I going to get through this?” After maybe the fourth year it all started to calm down. Now, for about two-and-a-half years, almost three years, no serious pain. I'm glad not to be experiencing what I was experiencing. It was debilitating.
As an athlete how does something like that affect you mentally? It must be particularly tough when your physicality is impaired.
Tough? Come on. Especially if it's your spine. That's like having a beam that holds everything up. And when you move your arms you're affecting that. When you move your legs, your toes. When you breathe. Debilitating is a good word. Fortunately, being an athlete and having been injured a number of times, you kind of learn to live with pain, which is not a very good thing. Pain is there to tell you something's wrong.
Do you have any stories from the set of Predator? I read that you, Schwarzenegger and the rest of the cast would go out clubbing...
You know, there's a great line: what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happened during Predator stays in Predator. But, yes, all is true. There were nightclubs. We were a bunch of young guys. We were all in our own way trying to one up each other. Of course, with training, Arnold had an entire gym there, so we were going to the gym working out to get all puffed up before scenes. Nobody wanted to look any weaker than the other guy. So, you know, it was competition constantly, competition in front of the camera, competition behind the camera, competition at night.
Young guys around other young guys in a movie that’s about physicality with lots of time on our hands in a beautiful location like Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. What do you expect, really? You expect a lot of fun, a lot of grab-assing, a lot of kidding each other, a lot of setting each other up for jokes, trying to pull pranks on each other. It all existed. But i think it also added something to the movie, this camaraderie, this sense of fun.
Is there something inherently linked between action and comedy?
I think when you are just behaving in an environment as you would behave and there is comedy in it, whether it's physical or not, it works. And of course on Predator we had that.
Do you think there's a reason why you're good at both?
No. I'd say just good fortune that it works out most of the time for me and has over the years. But no, I have no clue why. It's kind of like why does one person wind up being a race car driver and another person a great mathematician. God blessed them with whatever god blessed them with. There's no way of really explaining it.
Charisma is an important aspect of being a performer. And, for me, the roles that I've done, including Greef Karga in The Mandalorian, there is a kind of swagger about him and I don't know that you can manufacture that. That comes naturally, but there's also some thought in it. There's something about how you see the world and how you walk through the world that translates on screen, that comes across and people get and they see and they want to emulate.
Is Hollywood as bad on matters of race as the rest of the world?
As long as you have people in any industry, why are those people going to be any different from the population at large? There are many well-meaning people and people who have good intentions in Hollywood and then there are people who are the opposite of that. It's just the way life is. How many people at the top of almost any industry are black and brown? In the Western hemisphere, it just happens to be the way it is. It's changing, certainly. For many of us, not fast enough. For many of us, not with enough success, sometimes in fits and spurts and sometimes with tremendous peril. But how does society grow without people standing up and saying what is wrong is wrong and what is right is right? And clearly there's been so much that's been wrong in the treatment of human beings for so long outside of Hollywood that Hollywood can't help be the same.
Episodes of The Mandalorian series two come out on Disney+ at 8am every Friday.
John Boyega: ‘I’m the only Star Wars cast member whose experience was based on their race’
The Mandalorian series two: everything you need to know
Succession is the best, weirdest, most undefinable show on TV right now
