Lundgren is the biggest thing in any frame he stands in and is usually asked to do nothing else. When a director knows how to use a wall, as Stallone did in 1985, it works; most have given him a throne and a frown.
Fi1m perspective
In Rocky IV (1985), Bill Butler shoots Ivan Drago from below, so that he fills the frame and the ceiling lights sit behind his head like a halo. He is given almost nothing to say and he says it slowly, and Brigitte Nielsen, as his wife Ludmilla, does the talking for him. That is Dolph Lundgren's career in one set-up. He is a wall, and each film has to decide what to put in front of it.
The wall was built before the acting. Lundgren was a Kyokushin karate champion before he came to films, and after a small part in A View to a Kill (1985) and a long audition for Drago, the parts he was given through the late 1980s and 1990s were built around the fighting: He-Man in Masters of the Universe (1987), Red Scorpion (1989), Sergeant Andrew Scott opposite Jean-Claude Van Damme in Universal Soldier (1992). The characters had little to say and the films did not always mind. By the 2000s he was making direct-to-video action films and directing some of them, The Defender (2004) among them, and few critics were watching.
The Expendables (2010), with Lundgren as Gunner Jensen, brought him back into company, and back to Sylvester Stallone, who has worked with him five times and who understood in 1985 that the thing to do with him was point the camera up. Since then he has been a supporting face in other people's franchises: Drago again in Creed II (2018), King Nereus in Aquaman (2018) and in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023), where he gets a throne and a frown and not much else.
What works is stillness, when a film gives him something to be still about. Watching Rocky IV again, Drago frightened us less than we remembered and interested us more: strapped to the monitors in Bill Kenney's steel training hall, surrounded by men in white coats, he looks like the one person there nobody has consulted, and Lundgren holds his face so that it could be obedience or could be resentment. The film never asks which. Almost none of his films have.
Lundgren has said that "It takes nine months for a baby to develop, it takes nine months to develop a character." Most of the scripts he has been handed allowed for about nine lines. If you want to see what the preparation was for, start with Rocky IV, and watch what he does while Nielsen is talking.
Biography
Dolph Lundgren is a Swedish actor and martial artist. He was born Hans Lundgren on 3 November 1957 in Stockholm, Sweden.
He gained recognition for his role as Ivan Drago in Rocky IV (1985), which he reprised in Creed II (2018). Lundgren has appeared in the The Expendables film series (2010–2014) as Gunner Jensen and portrayed King Nereus in Aquaman (2018) and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023). Other credits include Arrow (2012) as Konstantin Kovar and a voice role in Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022).
