Sylvester Stallone is allegedly done with John Rambo, just as he’s allegedly done playing Rocky Balboa. But you never know. The actor-filmmaker has long had a habit of dusting off old characters. Not that the world has seen the last of Rambo. Indeed, on a recent appearance on The Tonight Show, Stallone entertained the idea of passing the torch to a perhaps surprising successor.
Per HuffPost, Stallone told host Jimmy Fallon that he had dinner with no less than Ryan Gosling, who spent part of the meal gushing about the former soldier, who first appeared in David Morell’s novel First Blood, which was turned into a movie in 1982, launching a franchise.
“He goes, ‘I was fascinated by Rambo and I used to go to school dressed as Rambo and people would chase me away and I still didn’t stop,’ vacation as Rambo, he just kept saying that he had a lot of affiliation with Rambo,” Stallone recalled. “And I thought, you know, this is interesting. If I ever pass the baton, I’ll pass it on to him because he loves the character.”
When pressed about Gosling taking over the role, Stallone replied, “I would say yes but I don’t know if anyone would say, ‘Hey, he’s too good looking to be Rambo.’”
Gosling has a long history of talking up Rambo. Back in 2011, the actor told Jay Leno about how he took cosplaying the character too far when he was a kid.
“I even thought my face felt like Sylvester Stallone’s and I put a bunch of steak knives in my Fisher-Price Houdini kit,” he remembered. “I took it to school the next day and I threw them at all the kids at recess.”
And of course, Stallone gets prime real estate in Barbie, his ripped figure captivating Gosling’s Ken, all because co-writer/director Greta Gerwig is obsessed with the guy.
So could Gosling get super ripped and take on the Reagan era’s angriest vet? It’s a weird world we’re living in nowadays, so probably.
You can watch Stallone’s Tonight Show appearance in the video below.
(Via HuffPost)