Carl Weathers, who went from dishing out jaw-dropping hits as a linebacker for the Oakland Raiders to dishing out finishing blows on the big screen as Apollo Creed, the archenemy of the Sylvester Stallone’s lovable boxer in “Rocky,” helping spark one of Hollywood’s most successful franchises, died Thursday. He was 76 years old.
His family said in a statement that he “died peacefully in his sleep.” The statement does not give a cause or specify where he died.
Mr. Weathers had a long and varied acting career that took him far beyond the boxing ring. He has deployed his palette on some 80 cinema and television credits. He memorably parodied himself as an acting coach in several episodes of the sitcom “Arrested Development.” Recently, 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 nomination for an actor outstanding guest in a drama series. .
Earlier, in Adam Sandler’s golf comedy “Happy Gilmore” (1996), Mr. Weathers made laughs as Chubbs, who had been a star on the professional tour before losing his hand in a car attack. alligator.
Despite this, his Apollo Creed character casts a long shadow. After the 1976 release of “Rocky,” which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won three, including Best Picture, Mr. Weathers reprized his role in the next three installments, evolving from the title character’s Muhammad Ali-like rival to his trusted friend and trainer.
His credo got another chance at boxing immortality in the exuberant, if cartoonish, “Rocky IV” (1985), in which he faced Soviet supervillain Drago (Dolph Lundgren), an icy, robotic mega-pugilist .
Creed’s star-studded entrance into the fateful match – wearing sequins and an Uncle Sam hat while strutting and prancing among the casino showgirls as James Brown, appearing as himself, sings the anthem “Living in America” – seemed at the time to be an apotheosis. of the patriotism of morning pop culture in Reagan-era America.
The good vibes wouldn’t last until the end of the sequence, however, as Drago pummeled Creed to death with a battering ram left in the jaw.
With his iconic character killed off, Mr. Weathers worried about his professional future.
“After so many years of creating an indelible character, so well recognized around the world – people in every language who have seen films have seen the ‘Rocky’ films and have seen Apollo Creed – which happens very often , is that 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.”
His fears would prove unjustified.
With his manly charisma and sculpted physique, Mr. Weathers matched his bulging biceps with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 action film “Predator.”
A year later, he parlayed his Rocky fame into a leading man, playing a crusading Detroit cop in “Action Jackson.” Reviewing this film for The New York Times, Walter Goodman noted that Mr. Weathers was “a member of the highly developed, upper-torsoed school of movie heroes.”
Mr. Weathers chafed at such categorizations. “That movie star label really has nothing to do with being a really good actor or artist,” he said in a 2020 British GQ interview.
“Enough promotion of any person, enough films where that person is shown in a particular light, can make them a movie star,” he continued. “That doesn’t mean that their acting skills are there to play a character that may not be like them, with complicated ideas behind the dialogue.”
Carl Weathers was born on January 14, 1948 in New Orleans. He has stated in interviews that he considers acting his first love and began performing in plays in elementary school. Yet his high school football prowess led him to play defensive end at San Diego State University under future NFL Hall of Fame coach Don Coryell during of a generous two-year period for the Aztecs.
The team went 11-0 in 1969, although Mr. Weathers missed much of the season with a knee injury. All the while, he kept his acting dreams alive and earned a degree in theater arts. But he also kept his eye on football and became an undrafted linebacker the following year for the NFL’s most notorious wildcat squad, the Raiders.
A lasting career in the league was far from possible, however.
“He was what we call a preteen,” Raymond Chester, a tight end who had been a teammate of his, 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. This would have been the ideal position for him. He had everything he needed. He was smart, he could run like a deer and he 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. He was going to be cut from the roster, the coach told him, saying, “You’re just too sensitive.”
“I couldn’t let go, man,” Mr. Weathers told Sports Illustrated, remembering the moment. “It kind of put a chip on my shoulder on one hand, and it was like an injury on the other, because as a football player – and certainly as a professional footballer – The last thing you want to hear is that you’re too sensitive. But without that sensitivity, how could I be an actor? How could I really be an actor of any value?
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
For all his bloody roles over the years, it was on the set of the light-hearted Gilmore that Mr. Weathers was seriously injured, fracturing two vertebrae in a hard fall. “Luckily, as an athlete and having been injured many times, you kind of learn to live with the pain,” he told British GQ.
By the mid-1970s, he was making regular television appearances on shows like “Good Times,” “Kung Fu” and “The Six Million Dollar Man.”
His big break with “Rocky” would soon follow, although things with Mr. Stallone, who also wrote the film, did not get off to a smooth start at the audition.
“There was no one to read with, and they said, ‘You’re going to read with the writer,’” Mr. Weathers told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015.
“We read the scene,” he continued, “and at the end, I didn’t feel like it had really sailed, that the scene had sailed, and they were calm, and there’s had this moment of awkwardness – I felt, anyway. So I just blurted out, ‘I could do a lot better if you found me a real actor to work with.’
It turned out that Mr. Stallone enjoyed his Apollo Creed-like fire. “Sometimes,” Mr. Weathers added, “it’s the mistakes that get you the job.” »
Jesus Jiménez reports contributed.