When Carl Weathers auditioned for the role of Apollo Creed, the prizefighter who gives an untried contender a shot at his heavyweight title in Rocky (1976), he was asked to read opposite the film’s writer. “Now – I’m ignorant – and as I finish reading, I say, ‘Well, wait a minute, if you can get me a real actor to read with, I can do this a lot better.’”
Unbeknown to him, his scene partner was the newcomer Sylvester Stallone, who had not only written the script but was playing the title role. “Somehow I got the job,” said Weathers.
A 6ft 2in former NFL linebacker, Weathers, who has died aged 76, brought the full force of his charisma to a role that could in less skilful hands have prompted straightforward hisses and boos. There was a depth and kindness to him that no amount of on-screen braggadocio could conceal. He spoke, said one LA Times reporter, with the “overly concise diction of a TV evangelist”.
To prepare for the role of Apollo, Weathers watched old Muhammad Ali fights for inspiration. Shot for peanuts, the film grossed $225m, won three Oscars, including best picture, and spawned four sequels. A further three films in the spin-off Creed cycle featured Michael B Jordan as Apollo’s son Adonis.
Weathers was taken aback by the instant fame that Rocky brought him. The day after the film opened, he said, “I was out for a walk in Manhattan and street vendors are yelling, ‘Yo, Apollo.’ That is scary. You are not prepared for that.”
He reprised his role in the first three Rocky sequels. Rocky II (1979) begins immediately after the events of the original film, with both fighters in wheelchairs, coming face-to-swollen-face with one another in the hospital.
“Get up out of that chair, chump, and let’s finish this fight right now!” Apollo demands, having won only on a split decision after 15 rounds. Later, there is a moment of tenderness when Rocky, bandaged and slurring, wheels himself to Apollo’s hospital room late at night, nudges open his door, and asks whether Apollo really gave the match his all.
Though they decide initially against a rematch, Apollo becomes incensed by the hate mail he receives branding the fight a fake. Rocky II ends with the opponents bloodied on the canvas. Struggling to his feet, Rocky is declared the winner.
In Rocky III (1982), Apollo trains Rocky against a vicious new opponent, Clubber Lang (Mr T). The old adversaries get back in the ring at the end of that film for a friendly sparring match, the outcome of which remained a secret until Rocky revealed to Adonis in Creed (2015) that Apollo had clinched it. In Rocky IV (1985), Apollo is brutally trounced in a bout with the Russian boxer Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). He dies in Rocky’s arms.
Weathers found many of the subsequent roles he was offered to be “pointless and meaningless”. But he enjoyed squaring off against another of that decade’s action heroes – Arnold Schwarzenegger – in the fantasy thriller Predator (1987).
In their first scene together, the men greet each other with a handshake that develops into an impromptu arm-wrestling contest. It is won by Schwarzenegger, his bicep bulging monstrously in close-up – a clear case of the more famous actor literally flexing his celebrity muscle.
Weathers later meets a sticky end during an encounter in the jungle with a shape-shifting alien. He loses an arm – his finger is still firing the trigger of his automatic weapon even as the limb falls to the ground – before expiring with a blood-curdling scream.
During his down-time on Predator, the actor developed with the film’s producer Joel Silver a lead role for himself as a Detroit detective in his own shoot-’em-up adventure, Action Jackson (1988), though a hoped-for franchise never materialised.
He acquitted himself well in the Adam Sandler golfing comedy Happy Gilmore (1996) as a pro golfer whose hand is bitten off by an alligator; in one scene, he sits at a grand piano on a golf course playing We’ve Only Just Begun. He reprised the role in Sandler’s Little Nicky (2000) but was even funnier as a tight-fisted, cost-cutting version of himself in four episodes of the sitcom Arrested Development between 2004 and 2013.
Weathers was born in New Orleans, the eldest son of a labourer father. He won a sports scholarship to St Augustine high school, then attended Long Beach Poly high school and Long Beach City College. He made it to San Diego State University on a football scholarship and graduated with a degree in theatre.
His professional football career began in 1970 with a single season with the Oakland Raiders. After being dismissed for being “too sensitive”, he played for two years with the British Columbia Lions in the Canadian Football League. “How good was I? I was good enough to make it … But I was never dedicated enough. I was never in love with football.” Acting, he said, was “a lot more fun, and I ache a lot less.”
He retired from football in 1974 and won supporting roles in television series such as The Six Million Dollar Man (1975) and Starsky and Hutch (1976), and with Pam Grier in the blaxploitation thrillers Bucktown and Friday Foster (both 1975).
After Rocky, he starred with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson in the football comedy Semi-Tough (1977); with Robert Shaw and Harrison Ford in the Guns of Navarone sequel Force 10 from Navarone (1978); and alongside Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin in the thriller Death Hunt (1981). He also wrote and performed the 1981 soul single You Ought to Be With Me.
Television work was plentiful, though attempts to fashion a long-running TV vehicle for him were hit-and-miss. In Fortune Dane (1986), he played a political troubleshooter battling white-collar crime; the show lasted six episodes. Its producer Barney Rosenzweig called Weathers “one of the more intelligent people I’ve ever been in business with. But he’s a physical animal. He’s gorgeous … The guy looks like a Greek god.”
He was a regular on Street Justice (1991-93), In the Heat of the Night (1993-95), inspired by the 1967 Sidney Poitier film of the same name, and Chicago Justice (2017).
Weathers also provided the voice of Combat Carl in Toy Story 4 (2019) and played the bounty hunter Greef Karga in the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian (2019-23).
Weathers’ three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by two sons, Jason and Matthew, from his first marriage, to Mary Ann Castle in 1973.
• Carl Weathers, actor, born 14 January 1948; died 1 February 2024
