Sylvester Stallone might be the biggest major movie action star the world has ever known, but a truly bizarre incident with pizza dough nearly prevented that from happening.
Stallone revealed this in a 1989 appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, which was motivated by Hall asking him why — when he was invited to Stallone’s house — the action star never ate a single slice of pizza despite being the one who had ordered it in the first place. Stallone responded by saying, “My stepfather was the pizza king of Philadelphia. I was raised on pizza. Matter of fact, I almost died in a pizza once.” When the audience laughed, he doubled down by saying, “No, it’s true.”
“Pizza dough was brought into the factory in these giant train cars,” Stallone continued. “I was hanging on the crane that lowers and raises these cars and I fell off and I got sucked into the dough. I said, ‘I’m gonna be the first man eaten by pizza.’”
Later expressing that he was a teenager when it happened, Stallone emphasized that he quickly realized a person can’t swim through dough even though he was trying and apparently making it worse, at which point Hall suggested it has the consistency of quicksand. Sly’s thought at that moment was, “This is like a horror show.” That’s when the pizza king of Philly came to the rescue. “My stepfather lowered this hook down and I grabbed the hook and they used the hydraulic hook just to pull me out of this, and it sucked my pants, my shoes….I have not eaten pizza since then.”
Of course, Stallone has eaten pizza since then, even doing so for a scene in his 1986 film Cobra. More recently, he threw a pizza party on his show Sly and the Family Stallone and is actually seen eating pizza all the time, especially at Mulberry Street Pizza in Beverly Hills, which is owned by his friend Richie Palmer.
Hall had the best possible response to Stallone’s story, telling him, “That’s the next movie, man!” Unfortunately ⏤ or perhaps fortunately ⏤ we were never blessed with this cinematic pizza adventure, but the Rocky star did go on to open an Italian restaurant as seen in Rocky Balboa, which was the sixth film in the movie franchise. In retrospect, we were robbed of one heck of a pizza dough scene, but if you happen to see one pop up in an upcoming Stallone project, you’ll know why.