Being Sylvester Stallone comes with its share of privileges. After all, Sylvester Stallone has appeared in a selection of the best action movies of all time, including the Rocky and Rambo franchises. He has a heck of a CV on the big screen, especially among fans of the best ’80s movies.
As it turns out, his reputation is so formidable that he can leverage his best movies to get him out of trouble on occasion. While promoting his 2001 movie Driven, in which he played a racing driver, he described an innovative way for avoiding a speeding ticket.
Speaking to Cinema.com, he joked that he has picked up his fair share of speeding fines over the years, but found a way out of one while filming the third Rambo movie in the late ’80s. Stallone said he was driving at around 145mph in a Porsche on a desert strip in Arizona during the filming of Rambo III when he was pulled over by a traffic cop.
“They think this man has to be a lunatic, totally nuts,” said Stallone. “And I said: ‘Did you see ’em? Did you see ’em? Did you cut them off? Are they still there?!’ And he went: ‘What?’ And I said: ‘There’s about eight guys with guns! Shit! I was running for my life. Do me a favor. Take me in, impound the car, they’re out to kill me. I don’t know what it is. People didn’t like Rambo, there’s this radical group, they’ve been threatening me and writing letters, now they finally caught up with me’.”
He continued: “Well, the cop escorted me all the way to the border, [saying]: ‘I’ll sit with you Rambo, I’ll protect you Rocky’. And I’m like: ‘Thank you officer’.”
Not all of us have the ability to play the Rambo card, but Stallone certainly used it with some flair in this case. He has spoken openly about negative reactions to Rambo, including his belief that Rambo could end his career, and so his story would’ve been believable to the officers. Or maybe they just wanted a story to tell their colleagues over coffee.
For more Stallone, find out why this Rambo 3 scene was slated by a war expert and learn why Stallone only ate three foods while making Rocky 3. You can also read our piece from the press conference for Stallone movie Samaritan.