During preproduction for Rambo III, Stallone had flown on a private jet to Denmark with his wife, Brigitte Nielsen. They had checked into a five-star hotel. And all hell had broken loose. 

“There was a huge left-wing demonstration against Stallone, Reagan, and American militarism,” says Sheldon Lettich, who was co-writing the script with the star at the time. “Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were outside his hotel room, shouting and chanting slogans. Then somebody spray-painted graffiti on his plane. I got a call from him after; he was very shaken up. And he said that he had called Reagan personally and said, ‘Hey, can you send over some Secret Service agents? Can you check the plane for bombs? Can you send some guys with dogs?’ Which they did. Because of the Rambo movies, Stallone became this symbol of American militarism. The left, throughout the US and Europe, disliked and even hated him.” 

The presidential conversations continued once the movie started shooting, the star sometimes ringing the man he called “Ronnie” from the set and talking foreign policy with him, clad in full Rambo gear. “One day I got quite angry,” Peter MacDonald remembers. “I said, ‘Where the fuck is Sly? They said, ‘He’s on the phone to the president.’ I thought it was the president of Carolco, so I said, ‘Well, tell him to put the fucking phone down and come here and talk.’ I didn’t realize he was talking to Reagan, not Andy Vajna or Mario Kassar.” 

The Hollywood icon and the Hollywood president had more in common than their political views. They both received regular death threats. They both were escorted by bodyguards wherever they went. And they both had access to a formidable arsenal of weaponry. On Rambo III, Stallone had more than ever: M203 grenade launchers, AK-47s, mortars, flamethrowers, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, attack helicopters, and of course Rambo’s iconic knife, which had been lengthened by another two inches, thus out-doing Schwarzenegger’s Commando blade. After assaulting a Russian with his fists on Rocky IV, Stallone would now bring hellfire down on the Soviets, waging a war in front of cameras that Reagan felt unable to wage in real life—though the Afghan rebels were being sent billions of dollars secretly through the CIA’s Operation Cyclone. 

For MacDonald, who didn’t harbor strong political views, it was a case of simply making it through the shoot with sanity intact. “I was hanging on by my fingertips,” he admits. “It was like hanging off a cliff, thinking, ‘Am I gonna fall this time?’ ” Incredibly, it was his first film as a director, and he was kept awake at night by visions of somebody dying in the skirmishes he was orchestrating, like the crew member who had plummeted from the waterfall on First Blood Part II. His mantra, whenever testosterone levels spiked too high, was “It’s just a fucking film!” 

One of the tensest days came in Arizona, where two hundred enthusiastic Civil War reenactors were drafted for a cavalry charge sequence. It was a surreal sight, a sea of men behaving like they were actually going into battle. “This guy dressed as a Civil War colonel came up and saluted me and said, ‘I’ve got the men ready for your inspection,’” recalls MacDonald. “I thought, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ These guys would have paid us, basically. We did the first big shot, tracking for about a mile with these horsemen and thirty explosions and bodies flying up in the air. At the end I looked back and said, ‘Jesus Christ.’ It was like a war zone. Then they all got up and started saluting each other. Behind the colonel a stretcher went by with a body on it, and this guy with a cracked bone saluted from the prone position and said, ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can, Colonel. I’m sorry I let you down.’ ” 

In Israel, there was another close call, this time involving Stallone. At the end of a long day, while filming a shot involving a Stinger missile and some tanks (an ambulance was on standby perpetually, just out of shot), the star’s hair caught on fire without him realizing it. MacDonald burned his hand putting out the blaze. “It could have gotten out of control, because his hair and body were so greased up,” he says. “It could have ended up like one of those Buddhist monks who sacrifice themselves. I couldn’t tell him, so I had to pretend I was patting him on the back. He looked at me very strangely, because I’d never done that before.” 

Attempting to direct Stallone was, by this point in the star’s career, an extreme sport. George Cosmatos, on First Blood Part II and Cobra, had rolled over on every argument, so much so that crew members nicknamed him “George Comatose.” MacDonald knew he was on thin ice, with Stallone so quick to fire people that the director stopped learning new people’s names until they’d lasted a week. While Stallone would later claim that Russell Mulcahy was booted off Rambo III for hiring insufficiently intimidating “third-rate male models” to play Rambo’s Russian foes, MacDonald remembers it differently. “Sly was walking through the bazaar set and started pointing at guys, saying, ‘They don’t look right.’ And I suddenly realized that the ones being pointed at were all about five foot ten and over. In other words, anyone above him.” Another day, during playback of a cut-together sequence, two editors sitting next to MacDonald had vanished by the time the lights went up. “One of Sly’s entourage was this Mafia enforcer or something from New York. He said to me, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Peter, they’re history.’ I never, ever saw them again. They could be floating around in the Red Sea, I don’t know.” 

Attempts to add more laughs and make Rambo more human were, in the end, fruitless. If anything, the character became more cartoonish than the actual cartoon Rambo, cauterizing a major wound with gunpowder and shooting down a Russian chopper with his compound bow, but with barely a flicker of humor (asked what a blue light does, Rambo replies, “It turns blue”). MacDonald did win one battle, at least: keeping Rambo’s child sidekick, an Afghan child named Hamid, played by nine-year-old Doudi Shoua, alive to the end of the movie. 

“This kid was annoying; he could drive you crazy,” says the director. “But he was full of life and energy. I’m doing a tracking shot with him and Sly with quite a bit of dialogue, and Sly gets his lines wrong. The kid picked him up and told him the right line. Now I’m looking at Sly and thinking, ‘This is not going to work too well.’ ” 

Stallone and his entourage skulked off. A short while later, a producer approached Macdonald and said, “Sly’s had a great idea. The kid’s got to die.” 

“In the film or in reality?” replied MacDonald. 

After holding firm, and cautioning Shoua not to meddle again, lest his character be targeted by a compound bow, the director got Hamid’s termination reversed and the sequence back on track. 

“I thought it was quite funny,” he admits now. “A nine-year-old going to war with the world superstar. ‘The kid’s got to die.’ ” 

From the book THE LAST ACTION HEROES: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage by Nick de Semlyen. Copyright © 2023 by Nick de Semlyen. Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.  Published by Picador in the U.K.