Ivan Drago
Played by: Dolph Lundgren
Movie: Rocky IV, 1985
Villain Info: Dolph Lundgren was chiseled, jacked, and seemingly cut from stone as the 6’5”, 260-pound Soviet boxer who was grown and molded to be a champion. Armed with a punch that hits with 2000 psi, the Russian (Lundgren is actually Swedish) kills Apollo Creed in the boxing ring to set up the showdown between Rocky and Drago—later sparking one of the greatest training montages ever seen on film—where he says, “I must break you,” before going 15 rounds with the Italian Tank.
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Another villain note: Lundgren almost “killed” Stallone while filming the movie: “After the third take of taking body blows, I felt a burning in my chest, but ignored it,” Stallone said to Ain’t It Cool News. “Later that night I couldn’t breathe very well, and they took me to the emergency room…The next thing I knew I was on a low-altitude flight from Canada to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and there I resided in intensive care for eight days…He struck me so hard in the chest that my heart slammed against my breastbone and began to swell, so the beating became labored, and without medical attention the heart would’ve continued to swell until it stopped. Many people that have car accidents die like this when the steering wheel slams into their chest. So in a sense I was hit by ‘a streetcar named Drago.’”
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