Feature31 December 2008
CEREBRAL ASSASSIN
Dolph Lundgren talks everything from Rocky IV to his fight with UFC pioneer Oleg Taktarov in Moscow!
Dolph Lundgren is like Shrek. Rather, he's like Shrek's onion - the man has some serious layers. Famous for iconic roles like Ivan Drago, The Punisher, He-Man and a zombie soldier with a Viet Nam hangover, many people mistake him for a two-dimensional meathead with the IQ of a brick.
In fact, Lundgren is quite brilliant. Academically, he is a scholar who holds a master's degree in Chemical Engineering and received a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - one of the most prestigious research universities in the world.
As an athlete, he was a world-class martial artist who won championships on three continents, and was even a member of the 1996 US Olympic team. And as an artist he has performed opposite everyone from Keanu Reeves to Max Von Sydow, and currently writes, directs, produces and stars in films for his own company, Thor Pictures.
Certainly his recent work has been lower key than his turn opposite Sylvester Stallone in Rocky IV. But while the last two years has seen Sly recycling old ideas and former glories, it has seen Dolph decorated by the Russian military and performing in a religious period piece about a Roman Tribune in 35AD, investigating the death of Jesus Christ.
Yes, Dolph Lundgren has layers. We caught up with him in Bulgaria on the set of his latest film for a fascinating conversation
FSM: Thanks for talking to us, Dolph. How are things going with your new project, Command Performance?
Dolph Lundgren: Great, thanks. We're about ready for production and we're going to shoot in about ten days.
It's what you might call a colourful role. You're an ex-marine turned drummer, playing in a rock band at a concert in Moscow that gets hijacked by terrorists. Sounds pretty wild - how did the idea come about?
[Laughs] It's an idea I got when I was in Moscow doing some promotion, and I saw that the Russian President was attending the Madonna concert with his two daughters. And somehow I came up with the idea, what if somebody took over that concert like they did with that theatre in Moscow six years ago [the 2002 Nord-Ost Siege]?'
Then I was thinking, if somebody took over the concert, who would I be playing? So I was trying to come up with a role for myself that was interesting, and it ended up being a drummer for a warm-up band. And he doesn't really wanna help - he's not really a hero but he's a tough guy, and when he gets pushed enough he ends up fighting back.
The role combines some of your real-life interests - you actually used to be a drummer, for instance
Yeah, I was a drummer when I was younger, playing in a school band and a marching band, and later a rock and roll band up until the age of about 18, 19.
Any plans to take that any further? You should at least record something for the soundtrack - it's a great way to boost your residuals!
[Laughs] Well, the Russian band that I'm playing with is called Bi-2 - they're famous in this country and they're perfect for this role. They're actually writing some material for the film, so who knows. But I doubt it - I think I'll stick to film!
You've had a considerable Russian slant to your career and you were actually honoured for that in Moscow last year.
Right. I was invited to attend this Special Forces conference last year and they presented me with an award for my faithful duty [laughs] in the movies. But it's a real medal from the Russian Special Forces, and it was funny because I wore it going out to restaurants that night and people were really impressed. I mean, not just in a comedic way, but for real. They're still very much into the military over there.
It's kind of surprising that you got that medal, given that you shot to fame as a Russian villain.
Who lost the fight!
Right! But it sounds like you have a big following over there.
Yes I do. They don't have any sort of famous Russian actors - they have a lot of talented people in the film industry, but not a lot of actors are known. So I suppose I've been there a lot and I've played a Russian in a lot of movies, so they've kind of adopted me as their semi-Russian Hollywood star.
You fought an exhibition boxing on Russian television last year against UFC legend Oleg Taktarov. How did that come about?
Well, they have a show called King Of The Ring, which is actors fighting each other sort of like a reality show. And for the season finale they wanted to have some more famous names, and I guess they went to Mike Tyson but he couldn't make it for some reason. So it ended up being me and Oleg. And it was quite an experience, because I really hadn't been in the ring under semi-real circumstances for a long time - and usually only in kickboxing and Kyokushin Karate. And with 5,000 people in the audience and everything else, it was an experience.
Having spent all those staying in movie shape', how did you find it getting back into something resembling competition shape'?
It was interesting, because I was working in LA on post-production for a picture I'd directed, so I was very much involved with the studio politics and I didn't even know if I would be able to leave. I didn't really know until about two weeks before it started. So I trained with my regular sparring partner, who's a very good Bulgarian Kyokushin fighter, and we kind of switched to boxing for two weeks. But fortunately I'm in fairly decent shape normally, and in the ring it's all stamina and endurance - a lot of it, anyway. So it wasn't that difficult, but next time I hope I have more than two weeks! [Laughs]
As noted, you were a competition fighter when you were younger. You trained some Judo and Goju-Ryu, but your real specialty was Kyokushin - tell us a little bit about your fighting career.
Well, I started competing in WUKO [World Union of Karate-Do Organisations], which was point fighting [minimal contact]. I did so-so in that, and then I found out about Kyokushin - or knockdown Karate as it was called in those days - which was a little tougher and full contact, which was what I enjoyed and was best suited for. So at first I fought in Europe, I had a stint in Japan when I was quite young, fought at a World Tournament and got a lot of experience. And then after about two years of competition I won the European Title, the British Open Title - actually it was kind of like the Europeans, but I won that twice. Then I went to Australia and joined the athletic club at the University of Sydney, because I was there studying, and I managed to win the Australian Open, and also some semi-contact competitions there and the Sweden Championships, and there were some other titles.
So it went on pretty intensely for about three years. But when I was at the top of my game was when I got involved with the film business, for better or worse. It would have been interesting to see what would've happened had I fought at the World Tournament that year, where I was one of the favourites. But I prefer the film business anyway!
You mentioned studying in Sydney, and people may not know that you have a strong academic background - you're a chemical engineer and you earned a full scholarship to MIT. Yet you chose not to pursue a promising academic career or your successful competition career; instead you went to New York for a one-in-a-million shot at becoming an actor. That's kind of crazy!
You're right, and that's what my parents thought - they thought I was completely nuts. But you know what it was? When I was younger I had a lot of allergies and stuff. I was kind of a lonely kid and I really didn't have that many friends, I couldn't play a lot of sport in the summer, so I kind of got into creative things first, like drawings and music, and I did some acting too when I was younger. And I liked that, but it all got kind of lost under the competition and the academic stuff.
So when I had to make a decision about my life, I knew that if I went to MIT and all that it would obviously be a good career. But I'd also done some modelling in New York, I'd done a little bit of acting, and there was just something exciting about that - it was something where I could find myself, learn about myself. So finally when I had to make the decision I said, okay, I'm gonna go this way even though it's a crazy thing to do.
When you were finding your footing as an actor, obviously New York is more geared towards theatre. Were you studying more for the stage or for film?
I was actually studying more stage, but I did it for a very short time - not even a year - before I was cast in a number of movies. There was one Rambo picture where I was just a bad guy, another movie which was a little bit different, where I was some sort of European playboy, but that's when I started to lean more towards film even though what really interested me was stage.
You're obviously very intelligent, and very cerebral, yet you've stayed faithful to the action genre. Do you embrace that and get a lot of enjoyment out of it, or would you sometimes like to explore other avenues, maybe even go back to the stage?
I know what you mean. I think part of it is that my personality is kind of laid back, and even though I work hard and I'm ambitious in one way, I guess I don't always push things. So I haven't explored my screen persona as much as some people would have done. But I've done a lot of acting - 30-something movies - and I think lately, now I've started directing, that's where I've kind of realised that yes, I can do other things. First as a director, but I'd like to start doing other things as an actor, too. Even if it's only showing people who I am - not the tough guy that goes around beating people up, but who I am as a person.
The first time we realised that you had real range was Universal Soldier, of all things. It's the scene where Sergeant Scott goes war wacky and holds the supermarket hostage, and you had that fantastic monologue. It was like, wow, this guy has serious chops!
Well thank you! That was a fun moment, and I worked on that a lot - you do have to think about it, and obviously when you prepare it pays off. Some actors are just happy to walk through it, and when you do it doesn't have the same impact on the audience. But yeah, that was definitely written more like a stage monologue, because it was quite big'.
We talked earlier about your fighting career, but combat sports have clearly changed a lot since your competition days. What are your thoughts on modern mixed martial artists contests like the UFC?
I think those are very tough guys. They're definitely very brave, and they have skills in a lot of martial arts and various ways of fighting that really didn't exist when I was doing it. The toughest was Kyokushin Karate, though there was some underground bare-knuckle stuff going on in those days.
It's an interesting sport, and it exposes young people to martial arts. And I think in relation to movies, a large audience has actually seen what happens when someone gets punched in the face. So I think in action movies now we're gonna see less of the ten punches to the head, backflip, twenty kicks, fight for fifteen more minutes and all that.
So that's one way to look at it. A little bit of a negative, I guess, is that in one way it's getting away from the essence of martial arts, which are supposed to teach you about other values, not just how to fight.
Which is really the difference between a martial artist, whose journey isn't just a physical one but also a spiritual and internal one, and a person who is training specifically to engage in combat. There's something lost in the art.
I agree, there is something lost. With traditional martial arts, whether you like it or not, it's gonna affect you in a certain way if you stick with it. It's gonna make the coward braver and make the loudmouth more humble, and it becomes very helpful to the practitioner not just in fighting people, but with their personality and their mind.
There's a lot of money and other opportunities available for professional fighters today. Is that something that would have affected your career path, if those same possibilities existed when you were competing?
It could have changed my mind, even though I was actually offered to sign as a professional boxer. I don't know if I've told people this, but I was training at Gleason's Gym in Manhattan in those days. Gerry Cooney went there, and some of those other guys, and they wanted me to fight.
I had a meeting with Michael Trainer, who was Sugar Ray Leonard's boxing manager. Because I was a blonde kid, very physical and co-ordinated - for a white guy, anyway - I was gonna be the next Great White Hope [laughs]. But you have to play that guy up and get a good enough record to go up against the champion, because that's how you get the contract that's worth a lot of money.
But I knew that I was more interested in the creative arts than fighting, because I'd already done fighting and I've never really been that much interested in money. You know, money's good in that it makes life a little more comfortable, but I just wanted to do something that was gonna enrich my life. And I knew that it wasn't going to be good for me - not good for my face! [Laughs]
Things seem to have panned out okay for you, so you probably made the right choice! We had the Olympic Games last month, and you were actually a member of the 1996 US Olympic team for modern pentathlon. That was a couple of years after you'd starred in the film, Pentathlon - what's your interest in the sport?
It started when a producer came to me with an idea to do a film about pentathlon. It's basically an athlete who defects during the Games in Seoul, and ends up competing for the United States in the next Olympics. This was in 1992, right after Barcelona, so he hired a couple of athletes from the US Olympic team to come and train me for the picture.
As we started training we got close, and they came up with the idea to have me endorse the sport, because after each Olympics they pick two new sports to enter the Games, but they also have to knock two out. So modern pentathlon came down on the list to be knocked out, and they wanted me to help try to save it.
And I decided too that it would be nice to be on the US Olympic team, because as a competitor you have to be an American citizen, which I'm not. But to be a Team Leader or a coach you don't have to, so I ended up being a Team Leader. And I still can't believe it when you say it - I went to the Olympic Games! It was a cool experience
For the rest of this feature, check out issue 32 of FSM - available at WH Smith and all good retailers. (For US readers we are now carried at Borders and Barnes & Noble, so check for local availability or click here to subscribe.)
Dolph Lundgren is like Shrek. Rather, he's like Shrek's onion - the man has some serious layers. Famous for iconic roles like Ivan Drago, The Punisher, He-Man and a zombie soldier with a Viet Nam hangover, many people mistake him for a two-dimensional meathead with the IQ of a brick.
In fact, Lundgren is quite brilliant. Academically, he is a scholar who holds a master's degree in Chemical Engineering and received a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - one of the most prestigious research universities in the world.
As an athlete, he was a world-class martial artist who won championships on three continents, and was even a member of the 1996 US Olympic team. And as an artist he has performed opposite everyone from Keanu Reeves to Max Von Sydow, and currently writes, directs, produces and stars in films for his own company, Thor Pictures.
Certainly his recent work has been lower key than his turn opposite Sylvester Stallone in Rocky IV. But while the last two years has seen Sly recycling old ideas and former glories, it has seen Dolph decorated by the Russian military and performing in a religious period piece about a Roman Tribune in 35AD, investigating the death of Jesus Christ.
Yes, Dolph Lundgren has layers. We caught up with him in Bulgaria on the set of his latest film for a fascinating conversation
FSM: Thanks for talking to us, Dolph. How are things going with your new project, Command Performance?
Dolph Lundgren: Great, thanks. We're about ready for production and we're going to shoot in about ten days.
It's what you might call a colourful role. You're an ex-marine turned drummer, playing in a rock band at a concert in Moscow that gets hijacked by terrorists. Sounds pretty wild - how did the idea come about?
[Laughs] It's an idea I got when I was in Moscow doing some promotion, and I saw that the Russian President was attending the Madonna concert with his two daughters. And somehow I came up with the idea, what if somebody took over that concert like they did with that theatre in Moscow six years ago [the 2002 Nord-Ost Siege]?'
Then I was thinking, if somebody took over the concert, who would I be playing? So I was trying to come up with a role for myself that was interesting, and it ended up being a drummer for a warm-up band. And he doesn't really wanna help - he's not really a hero but he's a tough guy, and when he gets pushed enough he ends up fighting back.
The role combines some of your real-life interests - you actually used to be a drummer, for instance
Yeah, I was a drummer when I was younger, playing in a school band and a marching band, and later a rock and roll band up until the age of about 18, 19.
Any plans to take that any further? You should at least record something for the soundtrack - it's a great way to boost your residuals!
[Laughs] Well, the Russian band that I'm playing with is called Bi-2 - they're famous in this country and they're perfect for this role. They're actually writing some material for the film, so who knows. But I doubt it - I think I'll stick to film!
You've had a considerable Russian slant to your career and you were actually honoured for that in Moscow last year.
Right. I was invited to attend this Special Forces conference last year and they presented me with an award for my faithful duty [laughs] in the movies. But it's a real medal from the Russian Special Forces, and it was funny because I wore it going out to restaurants that night and people were really impressed. I mean, not just in a comedic way, but for real. They're still very much into the military over there.
It's kind of surprising that you got that medal, given that you shot to fame as a Russian villain.
Who lost the fight!
Right! But it sounds like you have a big following over there.
Yes I do. They don't have any sort of famous Russian actors - they have a lot of talented people in the film industry, but not a lot of actors are known. So I suppose I've been there a lot and I've played a Russian in a lot of movies, so they've kind of adopted me as their semi-Russian Hollywood star.
You fought an exhibition boxing on Russian television last year against UFC legend Oleg Taktarov. How did that come about?
Well, they have a show called King Of The Ring, which is actors fighting each other sort of like a reality show. And for the season finale they wanted to have some more famous names, and I guess they went to Mike Tyson but he couldn't make it for some reason. So it ended up being me and Oleg. And it was quite an experience, because I really hadn't been in the ring under semi-real circumstances for a long time - and usually only in kickboxing and Kyokushin Karate. And with 5,000 people in the audience and everything else, it was an experience.
Having spent all those staying in movie shape', how did you find it getting back into something resembling competition shape'?
It was interesting, because I was working in LA on post-production for a picture I'd directed, so I was very much involved with the studio politics and I didn't even know if I would be able to leave. I didn't really know until about two weeks before it started. So I trained with my regular sparring partner, who's a very good Bulgarian Kyokushin fighter, and we kind of switched to boxing for two weeks. But fortunately I'm in fairly decent shape normally, and in the ring it's all stamina and endurance - a lot of it, anyway. So it wasn't that difficult, but next time I hope I have more than two weeks! [Laughs]
As noted, you were a competition fighter when you were younger. You trained some Judo and Goju-Ryu, but your real specialty was Kyokushin - tell us a little bit about your fighting career.
Well, I started competing in WUKO [World Union of Karate-Do Organisations], which was point fighting [minimal contact]. I did so-so in that, and then I found out about Kyokushin - or knockdown Karate as it was called in those days - which was a little tougher and full contact, which was what I enjoyed and was best suited for. So at first I fought in Europe, I had a stint in Japan when I was quite young, fought at a World Tournament and got a lot of experience. And then after about two years of competition I won the European Title, the British Open Title - actually it was kind of like the Europeans, but I won that twice. Then I went to Australia and joined the athletic club at the University of Sydney, because I was there studying, and I managed to win the Australian Open, and also some semi-contact competitions there and the Sweden Championships, and there were some other titles.
So it went on pretty intensely for about three years. But when I was at the top of my game was when I got involved with the film business, for better or worse. It would have been interesting to see what would've happened had I fought at the World Tournament that year, where I was one of the favourites. But I prefer the film business anyway!
You mentioned studying in Sydney, and people may not know that you have a strong academic background - you're a chemical engineer and you earned a full scholarship to MIT. Yet you chose not to pursue a promising academic career or your successful competition career; instead you went to New York for a one-in-a-million shot at becoming an actor. That's kind of crazy!
You're right, and that's what my parents thought - they thought I was completely nuts. But you know what it was? When I was younger I had a lot of allergies and stuff. I was kind of a lonely kid and I really didn't have that many friends, I couldn't play a lot of sport in the summer, so I kind of got into creative things first, like drawings and music, and I did some acting too when I was younger. And I liked that, but it all got kind of lost under the competition and the academic stuff.
So when I had to make a decision about my life, I knew that if I went to MIT and all that it would obviously be a good career. But I'd also done some modelling in New York, I'd done a little bit of acting, and there was just something exciting about that - it was something where I could find myself, learn about myself. So finally when I had to make the decision I said, okay, I'm gonna go this way even though it's a crazy thing to do.
When you were finding your footing as an actor, obviously New York is more geared towards theatre. Were you studying more for the stage or for film?
I was actually studying more stage, but I did it for a very short time - not even a year - before I was cast in a number of movies. There was one Rambo picture where I was just a bad guy, another movie which was a little bit different, where I was some sort of European playboy, but that's when I started to lean more towards film even though what really interested me was stage.
You're obviously very intelligent, and very cerebral, yet you've stayed faithful to the action genre. Do you embrace that and get a lot of enjoyment out of it, or would you sometimes like to explore other avenues, maybe even go back to the stage?
I know what you mean. I think part of it is that my personality is kind of laid back, and even though I work hard and I'm ambitious in one way, I guess I don't always push things. So I haven't explored my screen persona as much as some people would have done. But I've done a lot of acting - 30-something movies - and I think lately, now I've started directing, that's where I've kind of realised that yes, I can do other things. First as a director, but I'd like to start doing other things as an actor, too. Even if it's only showing people who I am - not the tough guy that goes around beating people up, but who I am as a person.
The first time we realised that you had real range was Universal Soldier, of all things. It's the scene where Sergeant Scott goes war wacky and holds the supermarket hostage, and you had that fantastic monologue. It was like, wow, this guy has serious chops!
Well thank you! That was a fun moment, and I worked on that a lot - you do have to think about it, and obviously when you prepare it pays off. Some actors are just happy to walk through it, and when you do it doesn't have the same impact on the audience. But yeah, that was definitely written more like a stage monologue, because it was quite big'.
We talked earlier about your fighting career, but combat sports have clearly changed a lot since your competition days. What are your thoughts on modern mixed martial artists contests like the UFC?
I think those are very tough guys. They're definitely very brave, and they have skills in a lot of martial arts and various ways of fighting that really didn't exist when I was doing it. The toughest was Kyokushin Karate, though there was some underground bare-knuckle stuff going on in those days.
It's an interesting sport, and it exposes young people to martial arts. And I think in relation to movies, a large audience has actually seen what happens when someone gets punched in the face. So I think in action movies now we're gonna see less of the ten punches to the head, backflip, twenty kicks, fight for fifteen more minutes and all that.
So that's one way to look at it. A little bit of a negative, I guess, is that in one way it's getting away from the essence of martial arts, which are supposed to teach you about other values, not just how to fight.
Which is really the difference between a martial artist, whose journey isn't just a physical one but also a spiritual and internal one, and a person who is training specifically to engage in combat. There's something lost in the art.
I agree, there is something lost. With traditional martial arts, whether you like it or not, it's gonna affect you in a certain way if you stick with it. It's gonna make the coward braver and make the loudmouth more humble, and it becomes very helpful to the practitioner not just in fighting people, but with their personality and their mind.
There's a lot of money and other opportunities available for professional fighters today. Is that something that would have affected your career path, if those same possibilities existed when you were competing?
It could have changed my mind, even though I was actually offered to sign as a professional boxer. I don't know if I've told people this, but I was training at Gleason's Gym in Manhattan in those days. Gerry Cooney went there, and some of those other guys, and they wanted me to fight.
I had a meeting with Michael Trainer, who was Sugar Ray Leonard's boxing manager. Because I was a blonde kid, very physical and co-ordinated - for a white guy, anyway - I was gonna be the next Great White Hope [laughs]. But you have to play that guy up and get a good enough record to go up against the champion, because that's how you get the contract that's worth a lot of money.
But I knew that I was more interested in the creative arts than fighting, because I'd already done fighting and I've never really been that much interested in money. You know, money's good in that it makes life a little more comfortable, but I just wanted to do something that was gonna enrich my life. And I knew that it wasn't going to be good for me - not good for my face! [Laughs]
Things seem to have panned out okay for you, so you probably made the right choice! We had the Olympic Games last month, and you were actually a member of the 1996 US Olympic team for modern pentathlon. That was a couple of years after you'd starred in the film, Pentathlon - what's your interest in the sport?
It started when a producer came to me with an idea to do a film about pentathlon. It's basically an athlete who defects during the Games in Seoul, and ends up competing for the United States in the next Olympics. This was in 1992, right after Barcelona, so he hired a couple of athletes from the US Olympic team to come and train me for the picture.
As we started training we got close, and they came up with the idea to have me endorse the sport, because after each Olympics they pick two new sports to enter the Games, but they also have to knock two out. So modern pentathlon came down on the list to be knocked out, and they wanted me to help try to save it.
And I decided too that it would be nice to be on the US Olympic team, because as a competitor you have to be an American citizen, which I'm not. But to be a Team Leader or a coach you don't have to, so I ended up being a Team Leader. And I still can't believe it when you say it - I went to the Olympic Games! It was a cool experience
For the rest of this feature, check out issue 32 of FSM - available at WH Smith and all good retailers. (For US readers we are now carried at Borders and Barnes & Noble, so check for local availability or click here to subscribe.)
From the Fighting Spirit Magazine archive. Byline: James Denton.