Sylvester Stallone “skulked” away after a child informed him that he had botched up his Rambo III scene. Sylvester Stallone is a proud actor who has worked hard over the years to earn his stripes – but he isn’t faultless. When Stallone began working on Rambo III in 1988, despite having been an actor for 20 years, one of the scenes got the best of him.
According to Nick van Semlyen’s book, The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flop, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage, director Peter MacDonald worked hard to keep Rambo’s sidekick, Hamid (played by nine-year-old Doudi Shoua), alive throughout the film. (Source: Variety) But when the boy got on Stallone’s bad side, the actor, affectionately known as Sly, wanted him gone.
“This kid was annoying; he could drive you crazy,” MacDonald remarked. “But he was full of life and energy.” MacDonald recalled a “tracking shot” with Stallone that included “quite a bit of dialogue.” “Sly always gets his lines wrong,” he remembered. “The kid grabbed him and taught him the correct line. Now I’m looking at Sly and thinking, ‘This isn’t going to work.'” Stallone and his crew supposedly “skulked off” following the embarrassing sentence slip, but a producer approached MacDonald soon after. “Sly’s had a great idea: the kid’s got to die,” the producer stated.
“In the film or in reality?” MacDonald joked. The director had to fight Shoua’s corner and keep him from being dismissed. He later told the youngster that if he got involved again, his shooting days would be over. “I thought it was quite funny,” MacDonald added. “A nine-year-old going toe-to-toe with a world superstar.”
It’s no surprise that Stallone was given a lot of clout in the film, given that its $63 million budget made it the highest-grossing film ever made at the time. This expenditure was made even more astounding by one of Stallone’s payment requests: he wanted a $12 million Gulfstream plane as part of his remuneration. He was given it.