Sylvester Stallone never made an Expendables movie without shedding some blood. But Expendables 3 pushed him to his limit.
“I grade the quality of a film by the intensity of the injuries,” he once joked. “When I shot ‘Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot,’ I never got hurt. Through ‘Rambo‘ and ‘The Expendables,’ I break my neck and my spine and I dislocate both shoulders,” he once joked in an interview with Mirror.
By that standard, the 2014 sequel should have been an instant classic. The action star suffered a brutal fall during filming, leaving him with a permanent battle scar. “I had some metal put in there,” he admitted during the same interview. “So if you hear any squeaking, it’s not my shoes but my back. But I’m getting better.”
Stallone had been no stranger to on-set injuries. His decades-long career was a highlight reel of battle wounds. But his Expendables 3 back injury proved to be one of the worst. The incident required surgery, marking yet another addition to his long list of cinematic war wounds.
Stallone wasn’t the only one who got roughed up on set. Antonio Banderas, making his Expendables debut as the fast-talking Galgo, took a hit on day one. “I was injured in my first take but I went through the whole movie without saying anything because I didn’t want them to think I was just getting older,” he revealed to Mirror. His knee pain lingered for months, but he kept quiet to maintain his action-hero credibility.
Jason Statham, however, had the closest brush with disaster. While filming a stunt, the brakes on a five-ton truck failed, sending the vehicle plunging 60 feet into the Black Sea. The former Olympic diver managed to escape and swim to safety, but the accident could have ended much worse.
Stallone, never one to miss a chance to crack a joke, took full responsibility. “Jason actually fought death in the midst of the Black Sea. He’s very modest about it, but he drove a five-ton truck 60 feet down into black mud because I cut the brake line,” he teased. “No one knows that, I wasn’t meant to reveal that.”
The film also marked a big-screen comeback for Wesley Snipes, who joined the cast as Doc Death after serving time for tax evasion.
The Expendables 3 may not have been the most successful entry in the franchise, but it delivered on what fans expected: over-the-top action, massive stunts, and real-life battle scars. Stallone and his co-stars wore their injuries like badges of honor. And while the pain eventually faded, the stories — and the metal in Stallone’s back — were there to stay.
