He said he wouldn’t even work out if there were other guys in the gym and would instead wait until they left. Following “Predator,” Carl Weathers tried his hand at leading his own action movies, to mixed results. According to producer John Davis, the rest of the cast, led by Arnie, got up and started working out an hour and a half after Weathers. He had a good start with “Action Jackson” in 1988, one of the decade’s most underrated action movies, but his 1992 effort “Hurricane Smith” didn’t fare quite as well.

As Stallone said in a chat with Ain’t it Cool News in 2006, they couldn’t come to an agreement because Weathers demanded “thousands of dollars” for two seconds of footage. How would Apollo Creed have been resurrected from the dead more than 15 years after he’d been killed on-screen? Nobody knows, but it was important enough for Weathers that after the negotiations broke down, he didn’t speak to Stallone for years. Light on his feet and loud-mouthed even in the ring, the character Apollo Creed seems to have been directly inspired by real-life boxer Muhammad Ali.

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As detailed by The New York Times, Hollywood stuntmen and other actors were brought in with him to help better prepare fresh-faced recruits for the very real and very dangerous situations they’d face in the Middle East. The fourth “Rocky” movie saw the death of Apollo Creed at the hands of Russian monstrosity Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) in a brutal match. Weathers, as Creed, sustains a series of blows from Drago so punishing that he dies right there in the ring, in one of the most riveting “Rocky” fights as well as one of the most emotional moments of the entire franchise.

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When director Ryan Coogler revived the “Rocky” franchise for “Creed” in 2015, Carl Weathers told The Detroit News that the spin-off meant the legacy of his character would continue. But about a decade earlier there was no such excitement when Sylvester Stallone directed and starred in “Rocky Balboa,” the long-awaited sixth film in the “Rocky” series. It all started when Sly called up his old friend to ask permission to use archival footage from a previous “Rocky” movie in the upcoming sequel. That’s because he and Stallone had a disagreement over the making of the movie that led to a falling out between the two actors that lasted for years.

But sports is where he really shined, earning a scholarship at his hometown’s St. Augustine High School. In 1970, Weathers got his shot at the pros. Though he went undrafted, he was good enough for the then-Oakland Raiders to give him a tryout, and he earned a spot on the team that season as a linebacker. After moving to California for his senior year, he graduated in 1966. Subsequently, Weathers first attended Long Beach City College, then transferred to San Diego State thanks to a football scholarship, and that’s where his football career really took off as a defensive end.