In 1985, it took four words—"I must break you"—to rocket Dolph Lundgren to international stardom. As Soviet killing machine Ivan Drago, the towering antagonist of Rocky IV, Lundgren made a serious impression; of course, in the years since, it's been revealed that he only got into movies on a lark, as his Masters' degree in chemical engineering probably would have opened up employment options for him in a different field. Fortunately, Hollywood has been pretty good to him, and if you've ever wondered whatever happened to Dolph, you may be surprised to know that he never really went away—and that, thanks to an old friend, his profile may soon be higher than ever.
He spent years in direct-to-video purgatory
After his Rocky IV success, Lundgren found himself with no shortage of offers. He starred in 1987's notoriously ramshackle Masters of the Universe as He-Man, and was the first big-screen incarnation of Marvel's Punisher in 1989; his performances in the underrated 1992 actioner Universal Soldier and 1995's Johnny Mnemonic—playing against type as a lunatic street preacher—were widely praised. But after '95, the big screen offers seemed to dry up, and Lundgren spent the next decade and a half working steadily in the types of films you only used to see on the bargain shelf at Blockbuster (when those existed).
Of course, no actor can be faulted for turning down steady work, and Lundgren's direct-to-video output was certainly steady. Between 1995 and 2010, he starred in roughly two dozen such features (including Universal Soldier: Regeneration, an underrated and utterly bonkers sequel). In an interview with Grantland, Lundgren was typically philosophical about this period, saying, "there's a certain fondness of all of those movies, because every film had something interesting about it. It's my life. Even if people didn't see the movies."
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