by Carl Weathers, who went from dishing out devastating blows as a linebacker for the Oakland Raiders to delivering knockout blows on the big screen as Apollo Creed, the nemesis of Sylvester Stallone’s lovable boxer in “Rocky,” helped unleash one of the most successful franchises. of Hollywood died on Thursday. He was 76 years old.
His family said in a statement that he “died peacefully in his sleep.” The statement did not give a cause or say where she died.
Weathers had a long and varied acting career that took him far beyond the boxing ring. He showed the range of him in some 80 film and television credits. Starting in the 2000s, he memorably parodied himself as an acting coach on the comedy “Arrested Development.” In more recent years, he was the voice of Combat Carl in the animated film “Toy Story 4” and played Greef Karga in the “Star Wars” television series “The Mandalorian,” earning a 2021 Emmy Award nomination as a guest actor. featured in a drama series.
Previously, in Adam Sandler’s golf comedy “Happy Gilmore” (1996), Weathers provided laughs as Chubbs, who had been a star on the professional circuit before lost his hand in an alligator attack.
Still, his Apollo Creed character cast a long shadow. After the 1976 release of “Rocky,” which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won three, including best picture, Weathers reprized his role in the next three installments, evolving from the main character’s rival to his trusted friend and coach.
His Creed got one more shot at boxing immortality in the lush, if cartoonish, “Rocky IV” (1985), in which he faced off against Soviet supervillain Drago (Dolph Lundgren), an icy, robotic mega-pugilist.
Creed starry entrance At the fateful game, dressed in sequins and an Uncle Sam hat as he strutted and pranced among casino showgirls while James Brown, appearing as himself, belted out the anthem “Living in America,” he seemed at the time be an apotheosis of the morning-on-patriotism of Reagan-era American pop culture.
However, the good vibes wouldn’t last until the end of the sequence, as Drago beat Creed to death with a left ram to the jaw.
With his signature persona eliminated, Weathers worried about his professional future.
“After so many years of playing a character who is indelible, which is so recognized all over the world (people of all languages who have seen movies, have seen the ‘Rocky’ movies and have seen Apollo Creed), what happens is that very often people start to confuse you with the character,” he once said. in a television interview. “There is no Carl Weathers.”
“Film producers,” he added, “tend to do the same thing.”
Their fears would prove unjustified.
With his manly charisma and chiseled physique, Weathers compared his bulging biceps to those of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 action film “Predator.”
A year later, he took advantage of his Rocky fame to become a leading man, playing a Detroit police officer in “Action Jackson.” Reviewing that film for The New York Times, Walter Goodman noted that Mr. Weathers was “a member of the highly developed upper-torso school of movie heroes.”
Weathers chafed at such categorizations. “This label movie star It really has nothing to do with being a good actor or artist,” he said in an interview with British GQ in 2020.
“Enough promotion of any person, enough movies showing that person in a particular light, can make him or her a movie star,” he continued. “That doesn’t mean I have the skills as an actor to play a character that’s maybe different from them, with complicated ideas behind the dialogue.”
Carl Weathers was born on January 14, 1948 in New Orleans. He said in interviews that he considered acting his first love and that he began acting in plays in elementary school. Still, his prowess in high school football led him to play defensive end for San Diego State University under future NFL Hall of Fame coach Don Coryell during a rich career of two years for the Aztecs.
The team went 11-0 in 1969, although Weathers missed much of the season with a knee injury. Meanwhile he kept his acting dreams alive and graduated in theater arts. But he also kept his sights on football, and the following year he became an undrafted linebacker for the NFL’s most notorious wildcat, the Raiders.
However, a lasting career in the league was a long shot.
“He was what we call a tweener,” Raymond Chester, a tight end who had been his teammate, said in an interview last year with Sports Illustrated. “Carl was strong and fast and had good size, but he was small for a linebacker. Today, Carl would be a safety. That would have been the perfect position for him. He had everything he needed. He was smart, could run like a deer, and was chiseled. He was a magnificent athlete.”
Mr. Weathers appeared in seven games with Oakland in 1970. But the following season, during a practice after the first game, he was summoned to see John Madden, the Raiders coach and future star broadcaster. They were going to cut him from the squad, the coach told him, saying, “You’re too sensitive.”
“I couldn’t let it go, man,” Weathers told Sports Illustrated, recalling the moment. “That put a little bit of pain in my shoulder on one side and it was like a wound on the other, because as a football player (certainly as a professional football player) the last thing you want to hear is that you’re too sensitive. On the other hand, without that sensitivity, how could I be an actor? How could he be an actor of any value, really?
Despite all his gory roles over the years, it was on the set of the light-hearted “Happy Gilmore” that Weathers suffered a serious injury, fracturing two vertebrae in a fall. “Fortunately, being an athlete and having suffered several injuries, you learn to live with the pain,” he told GQ.
In the mid-1970s, he appeared regularly on television on shows such as “Good Times,” “Kung Fu” and “The Six Million Dollar Man.”
Soon came his big break with “Rocky,” although things with Mr. Stallone, who also wrote the film, did not start well at the audition.
“There was no one to read with and they told me: ‘You’re going to read with the writer“Weathers told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015.
“We read the scene,” he continued, “and at the end, I didn’t feel like it was really over, that the scene was over, and they were silent, and there was a moment of awkwardness. meaning, anyway. So I blurted out, ‘I could do a lot better if they got me a real actor to work with.'”
It turned out that Stallone appreciated his Apollo Creed-type fire. “Sometimes,” Weathers added, “mistakes are what get you the job.”
Jesus Jimenez contributed reports.
