For nearly four decades, Dolph Lundgren has made a career out of looking indestructible.
The Swedish actor became an international star as the towering Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in 1985’s Rocky IV, before building a career that would span more than 100 films. In his new memoir, Fights Worth Fighting, Lundgren focuses more on the battles audiences didn’t watch him fight on screen.
The book traces an unlikely path from his upbringing in Sweden and studies in chemical engineering to martial arts, Hollywood and sudden international fame. It also ventures into far more personal territory, including the pressures and costs of his career, his private struggles, and his years-long battle with cancer.
Speaking with Los Angeles about the memoir, Lundgren reflected on the experiences that shaped him; and why at this point in his life, strength means something very different than it did when the world first met Ivan Drago.
After everything he’s survived, Los Angeles asked Lundgren a deceptively simple question: What is he afraid of now?
“We always have fears,” Lundgren said. “Everybody’s got fears… fear of death and fear of illness and fear of people close to you being hurt.”
Cancer changed his relationship with those fears.
“Once you face your own mortality, you’re a little more seasoned, I would say emotionally, to deal with these big setbacks or big issues in our lives,” he said.
Lundgren’s cancer journey began in 2015, when doctors discovered a tumor in his kidney. Years later, his condition became more serious. He has since spoken publicly about eventually receiving a second opinion and a different treatment approach before announcing in late 2024 that he was cancer-free.
In his conversation with Los Angeles, however, Lundgren focused less on the medical details and what the experience did for him psychologically. He described a life in which he had spent decades pushing his body…sometimes beyond what was actually healthy.
Lundgren said his therapist helped him see things differently.
“I lived such a hard life, I was so hard on myself,” he recalled. “I was doing crazy stunts. I was sparring, I was drinking too much, too many steroids. I was just burning the candles, both ends.”
In an unexpected way, he said, cancer became the one thing serious enough to make him stop.
“With cancer, you’re stopped in your tracks and you have to reevaluate how you live your life, which I did,” Lundgren said. “So it was a positive thing for me.”
That philosophy, trying to find something useful even in painful experiences, runs throughout his story.
Lundgren grew up in Sweden with a father he described as violent toward both him and his mother. He told Los Angeles that learning to process and forgive what happened during his childhood helped shape how he later approached cancer.
“I used it for something personal, something positive… to become a fighter and to use it in my acting,” he said. “So I try to look at things in the same way as an opportunity.”
One of the people who showed up during Lundgren’s cancer battle was the man responsible for giving him his most famous role. Lundgren and Sylvester Stallone have known each other for more than four decades, beginning when they were literally beating each other up in the boxing ring while filming Rocky IV.
Their friendship hasn’t always been smooth.
Lundgren acknowledged that the two had a “little falling out” amid controversy surrounding development of a potential Drago spinoff, which Stallone publicly criticized. Lundgren said he wasn’t involved in developing the project.
But when Stallone learned Lundgren had cancer, those disagreements suddenly looked considerably less important. “I was very touched,” Lundgren told Los Angeles. “He reached out to me very quickly when he found out. He was the first one actually who reached out of anybody.”
The two are now close again.
“We’ve been through so much together over 40 years,” Lundgren said. “ And we started up banging each other up in the ring.”
Their lives have continued to overlap in unusual ways. Lundgren said Stallone has his own book project involving Rocky, while Lundgren has his memoir. Both men are also appearing in documentaries connected to the other’s story.
“We have these parallel paths,” Lundgren said, adding that their difficult childhoods may also help them understand one another. And that brings things back to Ivan Drago.
Lundgren confirmed that there was, in fact, a script being developed at MGM for a standalone Drago project.
“There was a script at MGM they were developing, which wasn’t great,” Lundgren said.
The premise did intrigue him, though. The story would have found Drago and his son in Kyiv when war breaks out, prompting them to leave for the United States in search of a new life.
“I like that storyline,” Lundgren said. “It was just not well executed.”
He believes the success of Michael B. Jordan’s Creed III shifted attention toward the Creed side of the Rocky universe. As for whether Lundgren still wants to step back into Drago’s shoes?
“I’ve played the character twice now. I don’t know if I necessarily need to do it a third time,” he said. “But if there was a good script, it would be interesting for sure.”
Some of the memoir’s most colorful material predates Rocky IV entirely.
Before Lundgren became one of Hollywood’s quintessential 1980s action stars, he was a young Swedish engineering student and karate fighter who had barely experienced the world he was about to enter. Then he met Grace Jones.
Jones brought Lundgren to New York City, where his surroundings changed dramatically. Suddenly, he was inside the orbit of Studio 54 and a scene infiltrated by figures like Andy Warhol and David Bowie.
“I had barely ever had a girlfriend,” Lundgren recalled. “I was just studying engineering and working out.” Then came New York.
“I ran into all these people and all of her (referring to Jones) friends and the gay community and the creative community; Andy Warhol, David Bowie, these other people,” Lundgren said.
He even recalled running into Donald Trump a few times at nightclubs, whom he noted did not drink and “seemed nice.”
There was also plenty of sex, drugs and experimentation; Lundgren wrestled with just how much of it belonged in his memoir.
“I wanted people to understand this 27-year-old Swedish kid who got thrown into this Sodom and Gomorrah world and how that changed me,” he said. Suffice it to say, some of those details didn’t survive the editing process.
“I went back and took a few things out because it was a little too descriptive and maybe too personal,” he admitted.
What exactly was too personal? Los Angeles couldn’t resist.
“Some of the sexual stuff,” Lundgren said. “I took out some of that, but I kept some of it and also some of the drug use.”
He said he ultimately kept material he considered relevant because readers needed context for the era and the dramatic culture shock he experienced after arriving in New York. For a man whose most famous character could seemingly end a fight with a single punch, Lundgren’s message at 68 is strikingly different.
Fights Worth Fighting isn’t simply about beating an opponent. The memoir truly traces Lundgren’s journey from Sweden to Hollywood while confronting the toll of fame, his private struggles and the lessons he took from surviving cancer.
Lundgren now seems considerably less interested in proving how much punishment he can withstand. Cancer forced him to confront the possibility that his life might actually end, and forced him to reconsider how he wanted to live whatever time remained.
“I try to look at anything in life,” Lundgren told Los Angeles. “I try to see what I can learn from it.”
The post Dolph Lundgren Gets Personal: Cancer, Stallone, Sex, Drugs and the Stories He Almost Didn’t Tell appeared first on LAmag.
