Sylvester Stallone Says He Became Bulimic Filming 'Rocky III' and Used Steroids

Promoting his memoir 'The Steps,' the 80-year-old said he got down to 2.6 percent body fat and couldn't keep food down.

Sylvester Stallone says he became bulimic while making "Rocky III" and took steroids to build the body that turned him into an action star.

The 80-year-old actor laid it out in an interview with the New York Times published Saturday, timed to his memoir, The Steps, which goes on sale September 29. The Hollywood Reporter reported his comments the same day.

A whole generation grew up treating his Rocky and Rambo physique as something to chase in a garage gym. Stallone is now saying it was never on the menu for anyone doing it clean: "nobody does it without additives and drugs, period."

It started as acting. He told the Times he built the body in stages to fit the characters. Rocky began as a smooth, ordinary-looking guy who grew more vain as the movies went on, and Rambo, a soldier, needed something rougher and more animal. His model was a jaguar: lean, limber and aggressive, rather than huge like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Then the craft turned into a fixation.

"I got down to 2.6 percent body fat when I was doing Rocky III, and I couldn't hold anything down," he said. He added that part of him didn't want to keep food down, because he'd become consumed with holding that level of fitness, a kind of worship of his own body that he now describes as obsessive.

Asked directly whether steroids were part of it, he said yes. He described cycling them six weeks on and six weeks off, which he framed as the careful way to do it, and he said the drugs cost him badly too.

The bill kept coming for decades.

Stallone said he's had nine back operations and two shoulder operations. His neck has been fused three times. He joked that he's held together with baling wire, and said he still wants to stay in shape anyway.

The turn came from the least heroic part he'd taken. In the 1997 film "Cop Land," he played the weakest man in the room, a partly deaf, overweight cop, and he told the Times that role made him feel somewhat free of the armor he'd been building. The comp nobody in the muscle business wants to run: the performance that loosened his grip on the body was the one where he let it go soft. He said his standing in Hollywood slid not long after.

Looking back, he doesn't sound nostalgic for the jaguar. If he could start over, he said, he'd let someone else carry the banner and stop doing his own stunts, and he admitted he can't explain what kept pulling him toward getting hurt.

The Steps, Stallone's memoir, is out Tuesday, September 29.

Source: hollywoodreporter.com, retrieved September 27, 2026.