Carl Weathers, imposing actor who endured real punches as Apollo Creed in the Rocky series – obituary

Carl Weathers, who has died aged 76, played Sylvester Stallone’s boxing rival Apollo Creed in the triple Oscar-winning film Rocky (1976); he also had a famous handshake with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator (1987), played the cheerful golf instructor Chubbs Peterson who had lost his hand in an alligator attack in the comedy Happy Gilmore (1996), and was the voice of Combat Carl in the Toy Story films.

Weathers, a former professional American football player, stood 6ft 2in with a muscular bulk of 220lb. He had a big-pawed handshake and a commanding voice that suited his depiction of the flamboyant and aggressive Creed, a heavyweight boxing champion who is astonished to be put through his paces by the unknown Rocky Balboa.

Stallone had written the Rocky screenplay in less than a week, inspired by watching Muhammad Ali’s fight against Chuck Wepner in March 1975, and the world champion exercised a similar pull over Weather when he came to play the part of Creed. “We’re all standing on somebody’s shoulders, and Ali’s were the most visible shoulders that I could stand on,” Weathers said.

Carl Weathers in Rocky III (1982) – The Hollywood Archive / Avalon

When he read for the part with Stallone, he was under the impression that the 5ft 10 man with a weird drawl was nothing more than the writer. “I could do a lot better if you got me a real actor to work with,” Weathers complained. The faux pas worked in his favour. “Sly said, ‘Yeah, that’s the guy I want because he’s arrogant enough to play him. That’s what Apollo Creed would say’,” Weathers told a college reunion.

He trained for two and a half months for the fight scenes, though shooting took only 28 days. The film’s budget was a mere $1 million, small fry in Hollywood terms, but Rocky fizzed with such energy that it took $225 million at the box office. “It puts you on the map and makes your career, so to speak,” he said of the role.

By the time of Rocky II (1979), Apollo Creed and Rocky Balboa were more evenly matched; in Rocky III (1982) they became friends, with Creed training the “Italian stallion” for his bout against James “Clubber” Lang; and in Rocky IV (1985) the now middle-aged Creed came out of retirement to take on the hulking Soviet boxer Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), who dealt him a fatal blow. He died in Rocky’s arms in the middle of the ring. Creed’s demise was so realistic that the on-set doctors and film crew feared that Weathers had actually been hit.

Carl Weathers with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator (1987) – Shutterstock

Offscreen, he was challenged to a fight by Ali himself. He was outside a restaurant in Beverly Hills when the champion came down the street with a group of people. “Ali goes ‘Apollo Creed!’” Weathers told the Hollywood Reporter, imitating Ali’s notoriously booming voice. “Then all of a sudden, there is Muhammad and I, standing on the sidewalk throwing punches.”

Carl Weathers was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 14 1948, the oldest of three children of a casual labourer and his wife. He described the New Orleans of his childhood as “a heavy-duty city”, recalling how even film audiences were segregated.

“It was my curse to be a sensitive kid,” he told the Washington Post in 1979. “Certain things I was drawn to, like doing a little acting or singing in the choir, had no credibility on the street. And I was too ignorant and intimidated to try to explain why they seemed valuable to me. The other guys would say, ‘What is this, man?’ and all I could do was mumble.”

As a child he appeared in school plays but turned to sport because “girls weren’t necessarily interested in the guy who was an actor”. An athletics scholarship took him to St Augustine’s, a prestigious Catholic high school for black men, which he looked back on as “an overwhelming privilege and opportunity. For me it was as awesome as going into outer space.”

With Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV (1985) – United Artists / The Hollywood Archive / Avalon

After a summer with his grandmother, who lived in Long Beach, California, he moved to the West Coast. He was astonished by the more liberal regime there, especially in the parks. “There were all these kids, they had all different colours. You could check out a game, or a ball, and they’d actually trust you to return it after you were through,” he recalled.

After a year at Long Beach City College he won a football scholarship to San Diego State University but continued to act, including a walk-on part in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. He then spent five seasons as a professional footballer in the US and Canada, ending up with the Detroit Lions. “I was good enough to fool ’em, but never dedicated enough to become a great player,” he said.

Determined to move into acting, he used his imagination to beef up his CV. “In LA I lied about having acting credits up in San Francisco. How can they bother to verify your claim that you studied at ACT [the American Conservatory Theater] or worked as an extra in Dirty Harry? They can’t. But if you run scared, you’ll never get what you want.”

In 1974 he graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in acting, found himself an agent and a dramatic coach, and began auditioning for real parts. He had been an extra in the Oscar-winning political drama The Candidate (1972), whose director Michael Ritchie later cast him as Dreamer Tatum in the American-football comedy romance Semi-Tough (1977).

Carl Weathers in 2019 – Mark Von Holden

There were also small parts in 1970s television classics such as The Six Million Dollar Man, Kung Fu and Starsky and Hutch, in which he played a loan shark. His first major roles were in Arthur Marks’s blaxploitation crime dramas Bucktown and Friday Foster (both 1975), the latter co-starring Eartha Kitt. Then came Rocky.

The actual fight scenes were brutal. While the actors tried not to injure each other, he was crippled for four days when Stallone inadvertently slipped in a low blow during Rocky II. On another occasion Weathers accidentally broke the nose of a stunt coordinator.

He later appeared in countless other films, including David Lowell Rich’s remake of the prisoner drama The Defiant Ones (1986). He also parodied himself as an acting coach in the sitcom Arrested Development. Yet invariably his career remained in the shadow of the Rocky films.

Carl Weathers in the original Rocky – Avalon

He was amused when Creed (2015), the seventh instalment in the franchise, featured his character’s son Adonis climbing the ranks of professional boxing with Rocky Balboa as his trainer.

“If Apollo Creed was there to counsel his son, it would probably be, in my mind, ‘Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this. The reason I sweat and bled the way I did was so that you didn’t have to,’” Weathers told the Hollywood Reporter.

His last major role was as Greef Karga, the leader of a bounty hunters’ guild, in the Star Wars television show The Mandalorian, his face puffier than in his Apollo Creed days but his personality still just as charismatic. He continued to enjoy sport and was a fine cook. He also loved antiques, both cars and furniture, and once bought a 17th-century refectory table on the Channel Island of Jersey which he had flown home to the United States.

Carl Weathers was thrice married: to Mary Ann Castle in 1973; Rhona Unsell in 1984; and Jennifer Peterson in 2007. All three were dissolved. He is survived by two sons from his first marriage.

Carl Weathers, born January 14 1948, died February 1 2024

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