Carl Weathers Imbued Apollo Creed — The Embodiment of the American Dream —With Power, Confidence, and Intelligence

“This is the land of opportunity, right?” says Carl Weathers as World Heavyweight Champion Apollo Creed in Rocky (1976) as he figures out a way to make his next bout “viral” by inviting a local Philadelphia palooka to contend for his belt. His promoter tells him the idea’s “very American” and Apollo says it’s not, it’s “very smart.”

What was I supposed to make of a character like Apollo Creed when I was a 12-year-old kid watching the fourth installment of the franchise first, Apollo and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky friends instead of adversaries, sparring partners who start the film with Apollo joking how hard it was for a man of “my intelligence” to accept losing by just a second and, more, what a shame it was to be growing old. Apollo is powerful, confident, famous and smart, the counterpoint in the first film to Rocky’s street-tough enforcer and the counterpoint, too, to the charges made to diminish Muhammad Ali’s legacy post-Vietnam as somehow unpatriotic for his politics and involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Here was Apollo Creed in 1976 showing how commercialized nationalism is a sop to the unwashed and the easily radicalized; how Black athletes are forced into certain codes to be accepted by a culture that would otherwise demean and imprison them. Leave it to Stallone, ever with his glove on the jaw of social discourse, to pit aggressively-American Apollo against the “Evil Empire’s” Aryan Soviet boogeyman Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) in Rocky IV (1985), what is easily the most Reagan-era mainstream film of all time.

More to the point, leave it to Carl Weathers to create a complex, touching character from what could easily descend into a broad sketch. His Apollo deepens from film to film: cocky adversary to loyal friend to an aging athlete looking for one last shot at the spotlight. Stallone shoots a series of headlines for the Drago/Apollo match: “Red Star vs. Old Glory,” and “Superman vs. Superhype,” the one a clever take on the Soviet and American flags dragging Apollo’s age; the other an interesting echo of Gordon Parks’ Superfly (1974) that featured an unapologetic Black protagonist in the heat of Blaxploitation. America and its impression of the Black man in two text takes. Weathers plays desperation without humiliation, need without pathos. He doesn’t lower himself to elevate the melodrama of a fight he must lose so resoundingly that it becomes the hero’s motivation for not just the remainder of Rocky IV, but into a new trilogy of pictures featuring a grown son played by Michael B. Jordan.

Named after the Greek God of the sun, Apollo is a quintessential American icon, entering into his last battle to James Brown belting, live no less, “Living in America.” Apollo’s struggle, his Blackness, his knowledge that the ability to entertain is the only value he has in a racially Balkanized society where money is the only religion (“God, I feel born again,” Apollo says during his introduction) could all have been ironic if Weathers ever plays Apollo as the butt of a racist joke, but he never does. Watch what happens when all Apollo’s attempts to get a smile out of Drago during the ref’s opening remarks fail. His expression flickers for a second. He looks at Rocky. He glances at the audience and finds his footing again. When they touch gloves, Apollo realizes he’s about to die, but the show, you know, must go on.

Late in his career, Arrested Development nailed this specific element of Weathers’ persona, his ability to hold desperate need with a facade of cheerful showmanship: the tragedy you could say of being a minority in professional sports spaces controlled by unimaginably wealthy white men. In the show, he’s a struggling acting coach coasting on past glories and extolling the virtues of thrift and the craft services table.

In John McTiernan’s Predator, he plays Dillon, a former field agent-turned-suit who recruits old friend Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) on a rescue mission to South America. We see him during the opening credits, a shadow drinking by himself at a table. When he enters the film proper, he arm wrestles Dutch for long enough to prove that he’s the equal, for a while, with one of the most powerful men in the 1980s pantheon of beefstick, Reaganite American self-esteem matinee idols. His contest here, friendly and between friends, is nonetheless as symbolically loaded as Apollo’s bout with Drago from two years previous. This will be the same arm he loses to the Predator in some forest backwater as he’s buying time for his friends to make their escape.

Predator is an eternal return for the battered post-Vietnam masculine psyche where we return to the jungle again and again to lose again to an invisible enemy. Starring two future governors, it is — along with Back to the Future — the quintessential American film of this era and Weathers is its conscience: a man fooled by his country into betraying his friends who sacrifices himself to make whatever amends are possible to make. He is Dutch’s equal in strength, an Austrian strongman and professional soldier. His kryptonite is the allowances he’s made just to exist among lesser men who believe they are his superiors. Apollo’s desperation leads to his accepting a promotion behind a desk; he puts on a good show when he knows he’s maybe being lied to; and he pays for it with honor and blood. 

I love the attempt to make Carl Weathers an action hero of his own franchise in the next year’s Action Jackson (1988) — love it for how mad it is, how it’s at its heart a pro-union melodrama with Weathers the last honest cop in Detroit trying to democratize a corrupt automotive industry. I love it because Carl Weathers deserved to be the center and not the support, the righter of systemic wrongs that did not involve his race or his performative fidelity to the United States: that thing we demand of our entertainers, their obeisance the price of our acceptance. I love it because Carl Weathers was never really second fiddle as Apollo or Dillon, these foundational roles in which he put on the uniform required of him not from servility, but because he understood what it took to provide for himself and his family and sought to do so without sacrificing his wit and individuality. Apollo is the master of his image. He’s playing an audience of rubes like a fiddle and his spiritual father is Cleavon Little’s Sheriff Bart from Blazing Saddles. And what did I make of him when I was twelve and watching Rocky IV, holding back tears of rage at Drago’s apparent invulnerability and gnashing my teeth with hatred for this Soviet monster from our contemporary domestic mythology? I saw a family man and a friend, a great supporter of a former rival who regretted nothing of his friend’s successes but wanted now to provide security for the people he loves in the only way he really knew how to in this broken time and place. He’s killed by our expectations of Black athletes to compete in blood sports and international contests marked by nationalistic fervor. He’d be alive if he were valued for his decency and intelligence. No wonder Rocky risks everything to avenge his death.

Apollo is the American Dream: the good guy getting good things because he earned them. The first time he asks for a hand, he dies. Carl Weathers was the only actor who could’ve played both his extreme physicality and his disarming vulnerability; his indisputable intelligence (not cunning) and his irrepressible lifeforce. He died on February 1, 2024

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.