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Sylvester Stallone has opened up about the incident that sparked his long-running feud with fellow star Richard Gere.
The 80-year-old Rocky star looks back on the early days of his career in his new memoir, The Steps.
In one chapter, he explains that he was cast alongside Robert De Niro and Gere in The Lords of Flatbush, a 1974 movie set in the 1950s that centered on greasers in Brooklyn, New York.
He writes that he was asked to improvise with De Niro, which “went pretty well,” and then with Gere, which “went bad.”
Stallone recalls: “Gere grabbed my T-shirt and his fingernails dug into my skin. I told him to back off, but he did it again on the second take. He couldn’t have known, but Gere had begun to stir the emotional cauldron inside me.”
He continues: “I turned to [director] Stephen Verona and asked him, ‘Is it okay if I ad-lib here and react the way I would actually react if someone did that to me in real life?’”
When Verona asked what he’d do, Stallone replied: “Do? I’d knock his teeth out.”
The filmmaker replied simply: “Please don’t.”
As Stallone recalls, the tension between the two actors continued a couple of days later during rehearsals on the Coney Island boardwalk.
He writes that the pair were sheltering from the freezing weather in a car while eating lunch. “I grabbed a hot dog and jumped in one side. A moment later, Gere jumped in the other side with a big piece of greasy chicken covered in mustard on a piece of aluminum foil,” Stallone writes.
The Rambo star says he told Gere: “That thing is going to drip on me,” to which the actor dismissively replied: “Don’t worry about it.”
When “a stream of chicken grease” did land on Stallone’s leg, he recalls that he “elbowed” Gere across the chest before getting out of the car and pulling him out of the back seat.
“Hey, man, I don’t want to get physical,” Gere said, according to Stallone, who replied: “Too late…”
Verona apparently came between the two men before things could escalate further. After it became clear the pair could not work together, Verona reportedly sacked Gere and continued with Stallone.
De Niro separately left the production to work on a different film, with their two parts ultimately filled by Perry King and future Happy Days star Henry Winkler.
The animosity between Stallone and Gere allegedly continued for years. According to Sir Elton John’s memoirs, the pair squared up decades later over Princess Diana.
When the two men turned up at the same event, Stallone wasn’t happy to see that Gere seemed to be getting on famously with Diana. Later, Sir Elton’s partner David Furnish spotted the erstwhile colleagues “in the corridor, squaring up to each other, apparently about to settle their differences over Diana by having a fist-fight.”
Stallone’s memoir The Steps is out now.
