Sylvester Stallone has surprising pick for which of his movies holds up

Sylvester Stallone has an unexpected pick for which of his films shouldn’t be sentenced to cryo-prison.

In a new video interview with GQ, the Rocky and Rambo star broke down his most iconic movie roles, and when it came to 1993’s Demolition Man, he declared the sci-fi action flick to be one of his films that’s aged the best.

“I think it was a great movie. It’s one of the few films that really [holds] up, and it is almost close to happening,” Stallone said, referring to the state of the world as depicted in the movie, which he went on to describe as “the gentle-ization of society, everything’s so meek.”

In Demolition Man, Stallone plays Det. John Spartan, who is brought out of a suspended-animation prison to help catch an old and very violent nemesis (played by Wesley Snipes) who has escaped his own cryogenic incarceration in a future society that’s nonviolent to a fault.

“I thought it was just very, very contemporary,” Stallone said, adding that he ran into the film’s director, Marco Brambilla in New York recently. “I thought it was really well done.”

Stallone also gave his costar Snipes his flowers for creating a “very memorable” baddie in the film. “Wesley was wild,” he recalled. “He’s a wild man, very energetic, good fighter. When we were doing kicks there were some of these, like a plate here, so he could really lay into me, and I could feel it and it was good.”

He continued, “But Wesley, he really dug down there and gave a very memorable character. [He did] things with his hair and his voice and he was good. He was at the top of his game then.”

Stallone also gave kudos to the production design team, who built a practical set for some of the movie’s biggest moments. The actor, no stranger to stunts in his action-heavy career, added that Demolition Man contained the “two most dangerous stunts” he’s “ever done.”

One involved his character being grabbed by a giant metal claw and flung around. “That giant claw, sometimes the hydraulics would go sideways, and the strength of those metal claws would tear you up,” he recalled.

The other involved him being cryogenically frozen. “When they froze me originally, they put me in this round tub, thick plexiglass, you couldn’t break it with a sledgehammer,” Stallone explained. “And they started pouring in warm oil, and it’s filling up, filling up to [my mouth]… If it goes longer than 30 seconds, it’s gonna go to [above my nose], and you can’t get out ’cause the lid was bolted on.”

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.

He continued, “I had a couple of fellas that were sitting there with sledgehammers and hatchets. And I go, now that the scene was over, ‘Why don’t you try to open it?’ And of course they hit it 20 times, couldn’t crack it. So that was crazy.”

Elsewhere in the GQ interview, Stallone broke down his roles in Rambo, Rocky, Creed, The Expendables, and more.