Having topped the domestic box office in six consecutive decades, appeared in several multi-billion dollar franchises, won critical acclaim and awards season recognition, Sylvester Stallone has pretty much seen and done it all during his career at the very top level in Hollywood.
Most recently, the Rocky and Rambo icon has boarded both of the industry’s premiere comic book properties by appearing in James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and The Suicide Squad as Stakar Ogord and King Shark respectively. As awesome as it was to see Stallone in both the MCU and DCU, we kind of wish we’d get the chance to see him as Nick Fury brought it up.
In a deep dive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Sly opened up on his contributions to the comic book sphere, and revealed that he wouldn’t have been opposed to throwing on the eye patch of the cycloptic S.H.I.E.L.D. figurehead if the opportunity had come his way in the formative years of the MCU.
“I don’t look like any comic-book character. Like I could have never played the Terminator. No one would make a robot with a crooked mouth and voice that sounds like a pallbearer. It just doesn’t work. But yes. Who was the guy Sam Jackson ended up playing? Yeah. I thought I could have done something like that, where I’m not the main guy.”
If it sounds sacrilegious to imagine anyone other than Jackson assembling the Avengers, then let’s not forget that none other than David Hasselhoff played the role in live-action back in the 1990s in a TV movie. Stallone as Fury sounds nuts, but having his grizzled gravitas would make for an entirely different take on the character to Jackson’s more quietly charismatic approach, and it’d make for an excellent What If…?