Chartoff-Winkler ProductionsIn ’40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic’, the actor known for his portrayal of Rocky Balboa recalls all the tests make-up artist Mike Westmore did to create every little thing about his character.
- May 30, 2020
AceShowbiz – Sylvester Stallone struggled to find the right look for his boxer character Rocky Balboa and lost his eyebrows in the process.
The movie icon has narrated a new documentary about the making of the classic 1976 film and in it he admits he and director John Avildsen went to extremes to create every little thing about the boxer character.
“Mike Westmore was the make-up artist and he would do all these tests which were great but I wound up not having any eyebrows left for the rest of my life,” Stallone explains in “40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic”. “One time he wanted Rocky to look very, very punchy and I thought, ‘Why don’t you glue my nose to the side of my face’, so they got this kind of colostomy bag of glue and it was so bad it looked like a cartoon; like I had run into a wall… We took things to kind of extremes.”
Stallone admits he had to fight for Rocky’s iconic hat: “That was a real bone of contention,” he adds. “No one wanted me to wear the hat. They wanted me to just be bareheaded.”
“There was a store there (in Philadelphia) and I bought that hat for, like, three bucks and I was like, ‘I want to wear the hat.’ The producer goes, ‘You can’t wear the hat because Gene Hackman wore one in French Connection.’ I said, ‘So that’s the end of hats? Hats are banned?’ I said it kind of topped off the character and so we had him use the hat.”
“I had never seen a hat like it. It was, like, this cheap felt cardboard hat but it just worked perfectly and I think made a great impression on the character.”
Stallone also recalls Avildsen taking video footage between takes, which annoyed the actor at the time – but now those films have helped piece together the making of a classic in Derek Wayne Johnson’s film, which will be released digitally next month (June).
“He was always in the background and he would drive me crazy taking these eight millimetre films,” the “Rocky” star laughs. “At the time I thought, ‘What a waste of film’, but I’m glad he did it because here we are.”
Source: Movies - aceshowbiz.com
