Sylvester Stallone Says He Became Bulimic While Filming ‘Rocky’ Movies, Used Steroids

Sylvester Stallone is opening up about the extreme lengths he went to achieve his physique for the Rocky franchise.

In a Saturday interview with the New York Times promoting his new memoir, The Steps, out Sept. 29, Stallone reflected on how his relationship with his body changed over the course of his career. During the height of the Rocky and Rambo franchises, the actor became known for his exceptionally muscular physique.

“It became very intimate, you might say. It was my armor. I looked at Rocky: very smooth, very normal-looking guy. And then I said, I think the character would start to become a bit more vain. And then in Rambo, you’re playing a warrior, so you’d be a little bit more animalistic. You wouldn’t be so smooth,” he said. “I started to think: Design your body like a jaguar, a cat. Not big like Arnold [Schwarzenegger], but more feral and aggressive and very limber and athletic.”

But Stallone said it eventually became an obsession, leading him to develop bulimia while filming Rocky III.

“Then it became an obsession. Really bad. It got to the point where I became bulimic. You heard it here first. I got down to 2.6 percent body fat when I was doing Rocky III, and I couldn’t hold anything down. 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. And nobody does it without additives and drugs, period. I don’t care what they say.”

When asked whether he was taking steroids to achieve his physique, Stallone confirmed that he was.

“Oh, my God, you have to. 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. But that also took a terrible toll,” he said.

Stallone said his relationship with his physique began to shift when he took on a different kind of role in the 1997 film Cop Land.

“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. “Then things went sideways and I just fell out of grace with Hollywood. But yeah, I’ve abused my body. I’ve had nine back operations, two shoulder operations, three neck fusions. Everything is held together with baling wire, but I still want to stay in good shape.”

Looking back, Stallone said he no longer views his physique as the armor it once was and wishes he had treated his body differently.

“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.”