Sylvester Stallone has packed many jobs onto his resume over the years: movie star, screenwriter, director, producer and painter of Kafkaesque portraits, but in a new interview with Variety, he revealed that he briefly considered following his pal Arnold Schwarzenegger into politics.
“And five minutes later, I came to my senses,” Stallone told Variety for this week’s cover story on “Creed.” He remembered, on 2006’s “Rocky Balboa,” meeting the mayor of Philadelphia, who told him: “I believe you could be elected.”
“I said to my wife, ‘What do you think?’” Stallone recalled. “She said, ‘Are you crazy? He’s just being nice. You’re not going to be elected. You don’t have that insatiable need to be embraced by people.’”
Although he’s been called a Republican, for supporting John McCain’s 2008 presidential run, Stallone says he’s not a member of the GOP. “May the best fighter win,” he said. “I don’t think you can be totally one-sided forever. Then you close your mind to all sorts of possibilities. It’s just, ‘Who comes along better at that time for what the planet is going through?’ Right now, it’s pretty confusing on every side.”
What does he think of the Republican frontrunner? “I love Donald Trump,” he said. “He’s a great Dickensian character. You know what I mean? There are certain people like Arnold, Babe Ruth, that are bigger than life. But I don’t know how that translates”—he let out a laugh—“to running the world.”
To read more from this week’s cover story, click here.