Sylvester Stallone is opening up about the extreme lengths he went to achieve his physique for the Rocky franchise. The actor has now reflected on the physical demands that came with becoming one of Hollywood’s most recognizable action stars. Few screen transformations have become as closely tied to a character as Stallone’s evolution into Rocky Balboa.

Now, while promoting his upcoming memoir The Steps, Stallone is looking back at what it really took to maintain that image, offering a candid account of a chapter in his career that went far beyond the usual Hollywood fitness routine.

Sylvester Stallone discussed his transformation in a Saturday interview with The New York Times while promoting The Steps, his memoir arriving September 29. Looking back at the physique that defined his Rocky and Rambo years, he admitted that maintaining it eventually became an obsession, particularly while filming Rocky III.

“Then it became an obsession. Really bad. It got to the point where I became bulimic,” Stallone told The New York Times.

 “I got down to 2.6 per cent body fat when I was doing Rocky III, and I couldn’t hold anything down," Stallone revealed.

"I didn’t want to keep it down because I became so obsessed with staying at that point of fitness, literally an obsessive body-worship kind of thing," the actor added. 

The admission casts the famously shredded Rocky III physique in a very different light. By that point, Stallone had already turned Rocky Balboa from a struggling Philadelphia boxer into one of cinema’s defining underdog heroes, while the later Rambo films were pushing his physicality even further into action-movie mythology. The sculpted torso, vascular arms and relentless training imagery became part of the Stallone brand, but his new comments to The New York Times reveal just how punishing that image could become behind the scenes.

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But eventually, Stallone stopped seeing that physique as an achievement and started recognizing it as something that had taken a serious toll.

The shift came much later, when Sylvester Stallone deliberately stepped away from the physical ideal that had followed him through his action career. In The New York Times interview, he pointed to 1997’s Cop Land as the moment when he experienced a sense of liberation because the role required him to play a partially deaf, overweight character rather than the hyper-conditioned heroes audiences expected.

That change was significant because Stallone was no longer treating his body as the armor that had carried him through Rocky and Rambo. He admitted that he had a***** his body over the years and detailed nine back operations, two shoulder operations and three neck fusions. Yet even at 80, he said he still wants to remain in good shape, a reminder that the discipline that once helped construct the Stallone screen persona has never completely left him.

The Steps, appropriately named after Rocky’s famous Philadelphia Museum of Art climb, gives Stallone a chance to examine that legacy with considerably more distance.

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What do you think about Sylvester Stallone’s revelations about the physical cost of his Rocky-era transformation? Share your thoughts in the comments.