Sylvester Stallone is remembering his friend and Rocky III costar Hulk Hogan.
Hogan died Thursday, July 24, at age 71 after suffering cardiac arrest at his home in Clearwater, Florida. He and Stallone, 79, met while filming the 1982 boxing hit at a time when Hogan was still making a name for himself.
“He just came in and you knew this guy had a glow about him,” Stallone recalled in an interview with TMZ published Friday, July 25. “He was a force to be reckoned with.”
“He hadn’t quite come into his own yet, so we got him at a point where he was so enthusiastic,” he continued. “And I remember he was immense. He was probably about 315 pounds, but very smart. He had this deep, calming voice, and he was willing to do anything that would make this show better.”
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In the movie, Rocky faces off with the wrestler Thunderlips (Hogan) at a charity event. Stallone remembered that, while filming the fight, Hogan approached his moves with precision, allowing the actor to get through the sequence relatively unscathed.
“And the thing was, we started to roll around and he would literally pick me up and drop me to the ground, and I thought, ‘I’m going to be literally pulp by the time I land,’” Stallone recalled. “And yet he would always break the fall. He would do things you wouldn’t see, like a magician. And I’ll say, I’ve had a lot of punches thrown at me. No one was more accurate and precise than him.”
“Literally, he would punch with his knuckle like this,” he said, mimicking a punch, “and he would just touch the skin.”
But Stallone’s relationship with the wrestling icon went beyond the Rocky movies. Stallone said he saw Hogan just days prior, and he was able to meet the actor’s daughters. Stallone shares Sophia, 28, Sistine, 27, and Scarlet, 23, with wife Jennifer Flavin, whom he married in 1997. (He also has two sons with ex-wife Sasha Czack: Sage, who died in 2012 at age 36, and Seargeoh, 46.)
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“He had just met my daughters at a signing the other day,” he said. “He was very busy, took time out for them. It’s truly a tragic loss.”
Stallone also said Hogan was smarter than he got credit for.
“He also was very smart. Quite often people judge a book by its cover. I know what that feels like and they did the same with him,” he said. “But he was very smart, very entrepreneurial, musical, he had a plethora of all these subjects he was interested in.”
“I’m just a better person for knowing him,” Stallone concluded.
