The untold truth of Rambo

It's hard to imagine anyone but Sylvester Stallone wearing John Rambo's famous sweatband, but he was far from first choice for the role. According to Stallone, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Paul Newman, James Caan, Nick Nolte, Robert Redford, and Burt Reynolds were all considered before him. "I think they were going to lab animals before they got to me," he told Howard Stern in 2019. First Blood had been kicking around Hollywood for so long by the time Stallone got a call that he almost passed on it. "It was kind of a jinxed project," he said. "It had been around so many actors and gone through many changes with directors, and I was very nervous. As a matter of fact, the day of filming I was hoping that it would never happen, that it would just go away."

Despite Stallone's reservations, First Blood became one of the defining films of the 1980s. The first sequel, 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part II, managed to surpass it at the box office, but the critics were not so receptive. 1988's Rambo III and 2008's Rambo both failed to reach the high bar set by the original, but Stallone has promised a "very intense" finale in Rambo V: Last Blood. The character will remain forever ingrained in pop culture, regardless. No amount of substandard sequels can change the fact that John Rambo is one of the most influential action heroes in film history, but how much do you really know about him?