Dolph Lundgren: ‘In showbusiness, you kind of live for ever’

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If someone said: here’s loads of money, but we get the right to CGI you into movies for ever after you die, would you accept? LarboIreland

I’ve been in about 80 movies already. I guess part of being an actor is there’s some immortality. That’s why people are interested in showbusiness, because you kind of live for ever. So maybe I would. It depends how bad the movies are.

Was the bust up between you and Jean-Claude Van Damme staged for publicity? Granadapanda

The one in Cannes was staged. It got a little bit heated … I think somebody pushed my ex-wife into somebody. I can’t remember, but it was Jean-Claude’s idea. He’s a showman.

Squaring up to Jean-Claude Van Damme at Cannes in 1992. Photograph: Pool Arnal/Garcia/Picot/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

How did they make you look like a giant in comparison with Stallone? LeaderOfTheFree

I am taller than him [Lundgren is 1.96m (6ft 5in), Stallone 1.77m (5ft 9in)], so it’s all about camera angles. A lot of times, they put me on a box. When I come into the press conference in my uniform, I have lifts in my shoes. Stallone was clever to exaggerate the difference. Less talented actors would try to make themselves look bigger against the other guy, but he knew that, by building up the opponent, it made him look better at the end.

Did you really hospitalise Sly while making Rocky IV? mrnobody74

I don’t know. He keeps talking about it, so maybe he’s right. He did go to the hospital, but I don’t know whether it was my punches or the fact that he was so overworked as the director, actor and writer. We shot those 15 rounds over two or three weeks, eight or 12 hours a day, so you’re throwing thousands of punches. If you don’t connect, it looks a bit fake, but it doesn’t mean you want to hurt the other guy. But there were no hard feelings.

Did you use a stand-in? Hamble

Back in the day, you had to do it all yourself: Rocky IV, The Punisher, Masters of the Universe, all the Expendables. I’ve jumped from a motorcycle to a truck; dangerous things I would never do now. Staying physically fit over the years has been nice. There aren’t many actors who can stay physically fit for a long time. Part of the game is trying to look fit, at least.

Did your depiction of a Russian fighter gain you any respect in the Soviet Union? duffdawg

I think so. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Rocky and Universal Soldier came out on VHS and were the first western films Russians were allowed to watch. They don’t have that many international movie stars in Russia, so they’ve adopted me to some degree.

Do you still follow Everton? What do you reckon this season? Vammyp

I follow soccer a bit, but it’s difficult in America, because you have to be a diehard fan to find out when it’s on TV. I prefer the World Cup or the Olympics, when it’s a big deal. The Swedish ladies were pretty good in Tokyo, but lost [in the final] against Canada. Belgium had a good team – a lot of big guys.

Sylvester Stallone and Lundgren in Rocky IV (1985). Photograph: United Artists/Allstar

Coleslaw or mayonnaise on a ham sandwich? Twatacus1

I would say mayonnaise.

Hur ofta besöker du Sverige? Skulle du kunna flytta tillbaka till Skandinavien som oldie? [How often do you visit Sweden? Could you move back to Scandinavia as an oldie?] MissPiStorm

I visit a couple of times a year. My fiancee [the personal trainer Emma Krokdal] is from Norway, so we’re both Scandinavian. My two brothers and two sisters still live in Sweden. My older half-brother has the same dad, then four of us have the same parents, of which I’m the oldest, so I am still in charge. When we were little, I used to direct my siblings playing soldiers, marching around in different formations. My dad was in the military, so I picked it up from him. They hated it, but were too scared to protest.

I don’t know if I’d like to move back. I haven’t thought about it, but for now I like California. Los Angeles is where my job is and I like the lifestyle; it’s quite liberal, you can be who you want to be. People don’t care and leave you alone. The smaller the places, the more rigid the social structure, whereas everybody in LA is a bit of a freak, so I fit right in.

With Grace Jones in 1985. Photograph: Sharok Hatami/Rex/Shutterstock

Do you remember how to determine the Reynolds number for a Newtonian fluid? DirtyOverThirty

Oh, shit. No. It rings a bell way back in my head. Reynolds number has to do with flow characteristics, but I can’t remember exactly.

I studied chemical engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and got my master’s at the University of Sydney. Then I ran into the singer Grace Jones. We fell in love and moved to New York.

I always wanted to act, so I decided to try it, but I never regret studying in college – making friends and the intellectual atmosphere. You take the things you learn with you. They have certainly enriched my life on another level, because acting is pretty limited.

The love scene between Grace Jones and Roger Moore in A View to a Kill is really unusual. Do you agree? Leobatch

I agree. I was there. She has a love scene with Christopher Walken and she has one with Roger Moore. Roger Moore was a practical joker. He always brought something into bed [scenes] to alleviate the tension, like a sex toy. I think he did the same with Grace, but she knew about it, so I think she brought something, too … I can’t remember what, but it was even more extreme and I don’t think he was ready for it. They have this S&M moment where they wrestle around, if I recall, but it was all in character. I think she did a good job there.

Do you ever wear the ear necklace from Universal Soldier when you go out? TeeDubyaBee

It’s in storage. The rubber ears are 30 years old, so they’re decomposed and even yuckier than before.

Do you still play the drums? themurph100

Very seldom. I played a drummer about 15 years ago [in 2009’s Command Performance]. But I don’t have a kit, because, first of all, it takes up a large space. Second, everybody gets annoyed. I used to have an electronic one, where you just hear it in the headset. Maybe I’ll get one of those. Actually, it’s a good point. I miss it. I really should do it. It’s very relaxing and meditative.

Have you ever seen a ghost? ArthurSternom

I haven’t seen one, but I think I heard one many years ago in Sweden. I was staying in this 18th-century manor house in the middle of winter with my half-brother and his dad, to go hunting. I woke in the middle of the night, got really cold, felt something in the room and got really scared. I usually don’t get scared. Then I heard this woman speaking on the phone in old Swedish or something, but I couldn’t really make out what was going on.

There were no women in the house, but there was one of these old wooden phones outside in the corridor and all these pieces of luggage that used to be owned by my half-brother’s dad’s mother. She had killed herself in the room next to mine, but I didn’t know any of this until the next day. That was the first time I felt that there was something supernatural. I never went back to spend another night in that place.

What was it like working with Brandon Lee in Showdown in Little Tokyo? KieranK1982

It was a pleasure. He was a good martial artist, a very good actor and very charismatic, just like his dad. It was very sad what happened. He would’ve been a huge star had he not gotten killed so early.

Brandon Lee and Lundgren in Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991). Photograph: Allstar Picture Library/Alamy

Do you ever imagine yourself as a much older actor, like Max von Sydow, Sir Patrick Stewart or Sir Ian McKellen? A Gan‑Dolph the Grey? Murdomania

I’m starting to feel that way, because it creeps up on you. In Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, I play Amber Heard’s dad, this wise old king with a little beard and long hair. I don’t feel like a wise old king, but a lot of the fans watching that movie are maybe 10 or 15 years old. I’m 50 years older, so to them I am a wiser, older actor.

It’s interesting, because it’s gone full circle. I got famous young, when I was 27. But I’ve had some hard times in my career. Luckily, in last four or five years, I’ve done Creed II, Aquaman, and I’ve just finished The Expendables 4. I’ve got some interesting scripts I’d like to direct. I’ve done so much action that I really enjoy working on characters more. I don’t miss running around on a motorcycle shooting people, or jumping from a cliff to a plane – I’ve done that. I think it’s more interesting to use maturity and experience as an actor.

If you suddenly found yourself a young man in today’s world, what would you pursue? KitRey

I had a lot of issues from my childhood that I had to figure out by becoming a fighter and then an actor. It was more like therapy for me. If I was a young man today, I would probably still want to persue acting and directing, but maybe have a chance to train without being thrown into it, which happened in my case. I got famous in one movie and then was suddenly starring in big movies, not really knowing what I was doing. I didn’t have much technique as an actor and I had to figure it out. So, I would probably pursue acting in a more serious way.

Scott Adkins Kicks Ass

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Several weeks ago I came down with a bad throat cold. Somewhere between my third and fourth mucinex, I rented a movie I had heard about on Twitter entitled Castle Falls. Martial artist Scott Adkins plays former martial artist “Mike Wade” who discovers a bag of drug money while gutting an old hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. When a gang shows up looking for the cash, he must fight his way out. The movie opens with a bunch of production credits from companies like BondIt Media Capital and VMI Worldwide. It has a blues rock soundtrack. Adkins keeps his British accent, and at one point kicks a guy down an elevator shaft. Oh yeah, and it was directed by co-star Dolph Lundgren.

It’s also my favorite action movie of 2021. The setting is grubby and feels real, the fighting is close-quarters and raw, and Lundgren stages it in a series of reasonably long takes, the better to let Adkins show off his martial arts prowess. The film knows what its audience wants, and what it doesn’t: fights show up at a regular clip, backstory is convincing but pro-forma, we’re in and out in under 90 minutes.

Bulky, bearded, and from the other Birmingham, Adkins might be familiar to some moviegoers as a henchman in movies like The Expendables 2 and X Men Origins: Wolverine. But for fans of low-budget action movies, he’s a star. Around the turn of the century, Adkins got his start on British TV, before leveraging his martial arts skills to play a series of cannon-fodder roles in Hong Kong action films like The Tournament and Unleashed.

Over the next couple decades he’s gone from goon to grandee of the genre. In the past five years alone he’s played a major role in 17 movies with titles like No Surrender, Dead Reckoning, and Avengement. Even if I can’t vouch for every film, I can for Adkins, who can be both charming and vicious, a kind of beaten-down sadness trapped within his muscle-bound body. So too for Castle Falls, in which he quite convincingly plays a down-and-out temp worker who, despite his ripped physique, is in way over his head.

The self-described “king of the low-budget sequel,” he has taken over franchises like Hard Target and Undisputed in their direct-to-video eras. Yet it is Adkins, not the IP, who is the draw. His films often resemble throwbacks to an earlier era of action filmmaking, in which a movie could be premised around getting a single martial-artist into as many scrapes as humanly possible. Directors are drawn to him and fellow DTV stars Michael Jai White and Iko Uwais because of their fluid skill and sheer physicality. In Adkins’s work with directors like Isaac Florentine, the camera lingers over his poise, swinging with movement and holding wide to better showcase the intricate physical choreography, bodies counter-weighting one another like dance partners. I sometimes find it hard to believe that such a large body could execute such complex aerial moves, but then these movies have a habit of slowing down to let you know that yes, they can really do this.

People bleed in these movies, legs break, teeth get smashed in. The violence here feels like violence.

That is the art to this sort of action. These movies fit a series of miniature dramas — a knife kicked, a cut to a thug behind a door — within the scope of each set-piece, small inflection points that swell and resolve, one after another, to extend a seemingly simple tension (will they survive?) for as long as possible. Where more popular directors make a hash of their scenes, cutting from camera to camera for fractions of a second each, skilled craftsmen like The Raid auteur Gareth Evans know to prolong takes to show the full impact of a blow, to move and flip the camera in concert with a body plummeting off a table. Evans and The Night Comes for Us director Timo Tjahjanto pick up the hand-held and glide freely throughout their fights, floating up to view the mass of bodies thrashing down below. Often free to thumb their noses at the MPAA, these films can become surreally violent, full of blown-up heads and ripped-out-throats and a truly shocking number of machetes. People bleed in these movies, legs break, teeth get smashed in. You feel every blow. The violence here feels like violence.

Compared with the plasticine weightlessness and visual incoherence of much modern blockbuster action, these sorts of films take the time to really show you what a human body is capable of. Consider this scene from the 2009 Michael Jai White street-fighting vehicle Blood and Bone. It’s a scene you’ve probably seen before, in which the blustery locals are shocked by this unknown’s skills. And yet director Ben Ramsey stages it as a series of dead-pan medium shots, so that when one-time Spawn star White begins knocking people out, we see the punch, as if we were right there, watching. When he starts kicking, the camera whips with his movement, adding extra oomph whenever his foot collides with some dude’s sternum. And as he advances through a crowd of gangsters, Ramsey holds firm, stepping backwards as White steps forwards, neither losing their cool, even when jump-kicking into four guys at once. The violence feels real, and yet it’s so easy to watch you might forget how complex the staging of such a scene can actually be.

Of course, I’ve mostly talked about the good parts. Even in the good movies, premises can be thin, plots are often ludicrous, and tropes abound: honor-bound ex-cons, dead wives, indebted prison guards with very sick daughters who need just a little more money for that big operation. Small budgets mean plenty of costs cut in terms of sets, extras, and performances. One of Adkins’s signature roles, the Ukrainian kickboxer Boyka, necessitates a cast-level commitment to terrible accents. In a movie like Triple Threat, you can almost count the number of fights permitted in each contract. Castle Falls folds them all together and tops it all off with a money-hungry white power gang and the hospital’s impending demolition, a pressure-cooker of convention.

Yet after watching enough of these movies, many of these flaws can become virtues of a kind. Tiny budgets can mean independence, and thin scripts can be turned on their head. When John Wick made the murder of a puppy its inciting incident, it was hailed as a new start for the genre, reducing the revenge plot to its essence. But an Adkins movie arguably got there first. 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is the fourth direct-to-video sequel to a 1992 Jean Claude Van Damme/Dolph Lundgren vehicle, and one of the best American action movies of the 21st century. Adkins stars as a man who awakens from a coma, nine months after witnessing his wife and daughter murdered by intruders in the night. Adkins is weak and alone, and the only face he remembers belongs to the haggard, aged Muscles from Brussels. Overcome with rage and encouraged by his FBI tail, he goes off in search of the people who murdered his family.

Yet almost immediately, this stock premise goes off the rails. As he journeys in search of Van Damme, Adkins is confronted by people who seem to know him, though he has no memory of them. He finds himself stalked by a giant man in overalls, and has intensely strobing visions in which his own face is replaced by Van Damme’s. Mirror shots abound. “Even the movie’s vision of the hardscrabble American south (a favorite of this genre) is decidedly uncanny, populated by a suspicious number of muscle-bound Europeans.

Again and again, director John Hyams twists the conventions of this sort of low-budget action filmmaking to his own purposes, crafting a genuinely Lynchian odyssey into the genre’s heart of darkness. Adkins seems like a stock character with a generic backstory because he literally is one, grown in a lab and implanted with just the traumatic memories to trigger action movie bloodlust. The undead nature of both star and antagonists allows them to take on sickening levels of abuse, which Hyams accents in neon and washes out with overhead fluorescence. He leans into the cheapness, creating sets that splinter beneath the weight of thrown bodies, the movie tearing itself to shreds in real time.

Castle Falls doesn’t have Hyams’s verve or vision. But it does have Adkins, and I would gladly take his raw physicality and lack of vanity over what Hollywood has on offer these days, all rubbery CGI and movie star egotism. He’s the sort of actor you half wish would become a bigger star, while also dreading the ever-worsening movies he would make if that actually happened. After all, sometimes all you need are bodies leaping through space, or at least someone kicking a dude down an elevator shaft.

Robert Rubsam writes fiction and criticism.

Rafael Nadal news: ‘I spent four days in bed and then three more days destroyed physically’

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He made a smooth start to his 2022 Australian Open campaign, but Rafael Nadal has revealed he was “destroyed physically” during his battle with Covid-19 ahead of the tournament.

The sixth seed kicked off his season-opening Grand Slam with a 6-1, 6-4, 6-2 win over American Marcos Giron in just under two hours on Rod Laver Arena on Monday.

The 2009 Australian Open champion broke twice in the first set, once in the second and twice again in the third to progress to the second round.

It was his fourth win in Melbourne this year as he won the Melbourne Summer Set title last week, which is a welcome return to action for the former world No 1 as he struggled with illness and injury the past few months.

After missing the latter half of the 2021 season due to a foot injury, Nadal made his comeback at the Mubadala World Tennis Championship exhibition event in Abu Dhabi in December, but tested positive for Covid-19 after the tournament and was laid low for some time.

“Sometimes you are a little bit more tired – I don’t know because of it or because I haven’t been on the Tour for the last six months,” he said.

“The symptoms haven’t been nice. I spent four days in bed and then three more days destroyed physically.

“After that, I started to feel a little bit better, I had a negative PCR after the ninth or 10th day and then I had one or two practices at home, then I came here.”

Although he is used to many comebacks due to injury and delighted with return to action, Nadal admits there was “a lot of doubt”.

He continued: “It has been a very challenging [few] months.

“Not only the last six months have been tough, obviously being out of the competition, but since the last lockdown in 2020.

“Everyone knows that I have an important injury in my foot at the beginning of my career… after those two months being at home, when I came back, it was very challenging.

“It’s honestly been very tough in moments with a lot of doubts, but here I am and I can’t be happier to be back in Australia. It’s fantastic for me.

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“When you come back from injuries things are always difficult and you need to go day by day.

“You need to accept the mistakes and you need to forgive yourself when things are not going the proper way.

“At the beginning, things are going to be difficult, you will not have the best feeling sometimes on the court, but staying positive and playing with the right energy… and winning matches helps.”

The article Rafael Nadal news: ‘I spent four days in bed and then three more days destroyed physically’ appeared first on Tennis365.com.

Aquaman: Filming for the new DC movie has been completed

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It was shooting another movie for the director Capital It’s already finished – at least that’s what James Wan guarantees. The director had announced last Wednesday (12) that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom Her last scenes were recorded in the coastal city of Malibu, in the United States. The news was spread through the film maker’s Instagram account. The film is expected to be released for the first time in December this year.

In the post, Wan thanked the entire team for the “tirelessly hard” work, as he described it. “A thousand thanks to all the amazing team that worked so hard and tirelessly on this photo. […] Truly some of the best artists and crew I’ve been fortunate enough to work with. And a big shout out to the amazing Hawaii and Los Angeles units.”

In addition to filming in Malibu, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” will also include scenes that took place in the UK, where, according to the director himself, about 95% of the entire film was shot. The film now begins in production segment. “I have a long way to go before it’s ready,” he said, “but I can’t wait to share this little movie with all of you.”

So far, not many details have been revealed about the plot of the new capital. However, it is known that Aquaman was written by David Leslie Johnson McGoldrick. The cast includes Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, India Moore, Dolph Lundgren and many other well-known names in cinema.

Organizers seek to delay homeless count in Stanislaus County due to COVID-19

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The Daily Beast

ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty ImagesThere was a time when Donald Trump made news with his rallies—when he said things that utterly shocked us. Who could forget the firestorm he started, for example, when he went after Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who knelt during the national anthem in 2017, or earlier that year when he called Barack Obama “the founder of ISIS”?Trump’s performance in Arizona on Saturday night—his first rally in months and his much-hyped chance to respond to the one-year ann