Hearing the news of Carl Weathers passing hurt me in my soul.
RIP Chubbs.
I only found out 20 minutes ago.
He's always been Apollo Creed to me, but Happy Gilmore/Chubbs was probably his most memorable role where he wasn't playing a tough guy of some sort.
I haven't really seen him recently, but he struck me as someone that would definitely live to be in their 80s. I'm surprised Burt Young lived to be 83 (he just died a few months ago), as he looked a bit old and beat up back in the 80s and sounded like he was literally dying in his one appearance on The Sopranos as Bobby Baccalieri Sr back in the early 2000s.
A lot of people don't know this, but he had a very short career in the NFL as a linebacker with the Raiders. He also played for the BC Lions of the CFL after that.
The first Rocky movie had a bunch of commentary on the DVD, which featured a lot of notes from him and others from the movie. I haven't watched the extras in so long that I can't remember how it went, but he admitted that he lied to Stallone and others in production about having boxing experience, so that he would get the part. He said if not for his lies they probably wouldn't have cast him, but he did what he needed to do to get the role.
I kept waiting for him to make an appearance as Apollo's ghost in one of the Creed movies, much like Mickey did in Rocky 5, but I guess they didn't wanna go that route. And Mickey's appearance in Rocky 5 was also supposed to be a flashback to before Rocky's first fight with Apollo and not a hallucination or visit from the afterlife.
I do remember him not allowing archived footage of himself to be shown in Rocky Balboa, because he had asked Stallone for an actual role in the movie (presumably as a ghost/hallucination) and he declined. So he then declined for his archived footage as Apollo to be shown in the movie. Whatever happened there must have been cleared up by the Creed movies, as his images and footage are everywhere in those. I don't know if he and Stallone were necessarily on bad terms over the years, but things got pretty bad during the filming of Rocky 4 and he threatened to quit because of how hard Dolph Lundgren was going on him in the fight scene.
I'm overly bummed out by this. 76 seems too young for someone like him. He looked great in the most recent pictures I could find of him.