movies

Universal Soldier was his first true mainstream project, and director Roland Emmerich hadn’t even heard of him when the casting process began.

JULIANNA MARGULIES SAT DOWN on the couch. Then immediately stood back up again. There was, she would recall, a hard object beneath the cushion. She looked across at the man she was in the hotel room with, at eleven o’clock at night. “Sorry,” said Steven Seagal. “I must have left my gun there.”

Lundgren basing Sergeant Scott partly on Jack Palance in Shane and Van Damme patiently standing naked for the obligatory butt shots, while bragging that he could crack a walnut open with his ass cheeks.

prompting stunt coordinator Conrad Palmisano to come up with an eyebrow-raising solution. “A bunch of Black guys are attacking him in the scene, so I got a bunch of his Asian stunt team painted black,” remembers Palmisano, an event that surely would not be permitted today.

1991’s Double Impact. Inspired by a 1941 Douglas Fairbanks movie called The Corsican Brothers, which was in turn based on an 1844 novella by Alexandre Dumas, it cast Van Damme as a pair of twin brothers, playboy Chad and gangster Alex, who are seeking revenge for the murder of their parents.