Sylvester Stallone Says He Became Bulimic and Used Steroids for ‘Rocky’

• Sylvester Stallone, 80, said he “became bulimic” while getting down to 2.6% body fat for Rocky III (1982), and that he used steroids to keep his physique.
• He described his first panic attack, at 36, and a childhood in which, he said, his father beat him and his mother never hugged him.
• He told the stories to The New York Times ahead of his memoir, The Steps, which comes out Tuesday, Sept. 29.

Sylvester Stallone is opening up about what Rocky cost him. In an interview published Saturday (Sept. 26), the 80-year-old said he “became bulimic” while building his body for Rocky III and took steroids to keep it that way.

The conversation, with Lulu Garcia-Navarro for The New York Times’ The Interview, comes three days before his memoir, The Steps, hits shelves.

What did Sylvester Stallone say about bulimia and steroids?

He said he designed his body for each role, “like a jaguar, a cat, not big like Arnold,” and that it turned into an obsession. “It became to the point where I became bulimic,” he said. “You heard it here first.”

For the opening scene of Rocky III, he said, he got down to 2.6% body fat. “I couldn’t hold anything down, or if I did, I didn’t want to keep it down,” he said. “I became so obsessed at staying at that point of fitness.”

On steroids, he didn’t hedge. “Nobody does it without, you know, additives and drugs, period,” Stallone said, describing cycles of “six weeks on, six weeks off.” He added that it “took a terrible toll.”

The body kept the bill. He listed nine back operations, two shoulder operations and three neck fusions, and said that only when he gained weight to play a partly deaf sheriff in Cop Land (1997) did he feel “somewhat liberated.”

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What happened in Sylvester Stallone’s childhood?

He described a home with little affection and a lot of violence. “My mother never, and my brother will attest, hugged me ever, ever,” he said. His father, he said, once kicked him in the stomach before church because he came back from the store with the wrong bread.

“I didn’t put a lot of stuff in the book because I didn’t want a pity party,” he said.

As a teenager at a residential school, he said, he was locked in its psychiatric ward for about two weeks as punishment for sneaking out, and was attacked there by another patient. Rocky, he said, became the father he never had: “It’s my father. It’s what I wish, you know, I could be.”

When did Sylvester Stallone’s panic attacks start?

At 36, while he was watching dailies, the raw footage from a day of shooting. “I’m dying. This is it,” he remembered thinking. “Took a knee, crawled, rolled over.” The attacks came back “again and again and again,” then disappeared for five years.

They still show up at the worst moments, he said, like right before a live TV appearance on the Today show.

What is ‘The Steps’ about?

The Steps: A Memoir is out Tuesday, Sept. 29, from William Morrow. The title points to the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps that Rocky runs up, and an excerpt released this week covers how he came up with the character while broke, imagining life as “a boxing ring.”

Stallone first showed the book on The Tonight Show a year ago. His next sit-down, with Tracy Smith for CBS Sunday Morning, airs Sunday, Sept. 27. He also stars in Tulsa King on Paramount+.

Stallone was in the news this year for another reason: he says he never accepted Donald Trump’s Hollywood ambassador job. More stars telling their own stories: Matthew Rhys on the day Dustin Hoffman snubbed him and William Shatner’s heavy metal debut at 95. More in Celebrities.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: Sylvester Stallone to Lulu Garcia-Navarro on The New York Times’ The Interview (Sept. 26, 2026); William Morrow/HarperCollins (The Steps: A Memoir, publication date); book excerpt and CBS Sunday Morning air date from CBS News; Stallone on Sunday Today (NBC, Sept. 2026) and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (Sept. 2025). Photos: Amazon MGM Studios (Rocky III trailer), The New York Times (The Interview), NBC.