Plague of Strength

Little more needs to be said about the pedigree of Sven-Ole Thorsen- the man was a dyed in the wool, bad-as-hell, jacked motherfucker with a rich buddy and a body that wouldn’t stop. He was Dennis Reynolds without the dive bar or imagined popularity- a Golden God, if you will, who could throw punches in bunches and rep with over 500 pounds on the bench press. He speaks four languages, popularized Shotokan karate in continental Europe as a Shotokan Cup champion, loves dogs, was Denmark’s Strongest Man, and was in many of the most iconic movies of the 80s and 90s. Legendary hardly begins to describe him.

We left him on-set for his first Hollywood film, Conan the Barbarian, which was an unmitigated meathead’s paradise. They lifted both on-set and off, training like maniacs to look phenomenal half naked, then ate like carnival side show geeks whenever they weren’t lifting or acting. And Sven needed those extra calories- the hammer he wielded as Thor weighed 55 pounds and was so heavy that swinging it pulled him off a horse in spite of the fact he tipped the scales at between 300 and 320 pounds onset. Schwarzenegger was lighter than usual, at 210 pounds, in an effort to make him look less like an ungainly Austrian bodybuilder and more like a born-in-the-saddle, bloodthirsty badass of the Eurasian steppes. As such, they balanced out their massive food consumption with a shitload of running, lifting, rope climbing, horseback riding, swimming, and partying, which we all know is anabolic (go here and here if you’re curious).

“Seventeen different locations around Spain, eating great food, great wine, chasing women – having so much fun! Every day on location we were served three course meals, with fruit, cheese, and wine. And of course, there were food fights, so lunch lasted three to four hours! By the afternoon, we were all tipsy” (Singh).

It’s no wonder that Sven was primed and ready to compete after filming Conan in 1982- he’s been training like a fucking lunatic for the film, so he might as well put that muscle to competitive use.. He took the title of Denmark’s Strongest Man in its inaugural event, then immediately rolled down to Mexico to shoot Conan the Destroyer, which ended up flopping after the studio decided to take the franchise PG (there was no PG13 rating until Red Dawn in 1984). Sven again played a semi-important role in the film, battling Arnold in an epic swordfight in a film that featured former Bruce Lee student, unrepentant sex maniac, and occasional basketball player Wilt Chamberlain and Mako, who starred in Barbarian as well.

The reason behind the inclusion of a man who admits he can’t act worth a shit and couldn’t even deliver a single speaking line in Conan in every movie Arnold could is about as awesome as you would expect. After achieving nearly simultaneous success as jacked action movie stars, Arnold and Sylvester Stallone had a rivalry that was no work for the sake of driving publicity (*cough* Eddie Hall and Hafthor *cough*)- they fucking hated each other for whatever reason. Seeing this as a silly waste of energy, Sven brokered peace between the two, and in return, Arnold hooked his boy up with a bunch of “sweet deaths” as he called them, starting with the giant spike through the chest Sven nabbed in Conan (Hewitt).

That was it for Sven until he got the call for Predator, which I imagine would be a lot like getting called and told you’ve won the fucking lottery. Certainly Sven was far from bored at the time, since he was still actively involved in competing in strongman and powerlifting, was a bodybuilding judge in Denmark, randomly beating down dickheads on the street and making them crawl into the city square after they harassed some older people (Andersen), and ran one of the most popular Shotokan dojos in continental Europe, and he was enjoying the honeymoon period of his second marriage, to the snake-charmer/bodybuilder/pop singer Anniqa, who Sven had stolen from one of his training partners after what was almost certainly a lot of low key fucking after they met in the 70s.

According to Sven, he’s been in nothing but open relationships since the late 1970s, so that might account for the easy transition, unlike Wesley Snipes, who was allegedly knocked out by Mike Tyson in a bathroom after banging the champ’s girl. Sven’s buddy, Hans Jørgen Jacobsen (1940-1999), was a heavyweight boxer, wrestler, and strongman, but either respected the Shotokan wielded by a strongman rather than a 195 pound actor or just didn’t give a fuck because everyone was passing around chicks like they were chips and dip at a party. Either way, everyone involved in that situation was fucking awesome.

The Summer of Big Biceps, Predator’s On-Set Gym, and the Swole Motherfuckers Who Used It

When it came time to cast Predator, director John McTiernan (who directed two other highly influential films in my formative years, Die Hard and 13th Warrior) specifically looked for guys with prior military experience and acting skills, in spite of the fact that the studio specifically asked for redneck types who would talk about nothing but titties and monster trucks in an effort to connect with America’s Over the Top audience. As the original idea was Rocky meets Alien, starring Arnold and using the ancient trope of an evil monster spreading darkness across the land (which is at least as old as the ancient Akkadians and the epic of Gilgamesh).

The More You Know: “Following the release of Rocky IV in 1985, executives in Hollywood joked that since the series’ hero Rocky Balboa had defeated all earthly opponents, he would have to fight an alien if a fifth installment of the boxing series were ever to be made. Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas saw some potential in the concept and wrote a screenplay based on the joke. The original concept involved a number of different alien hunters coming to Earth to hunt various creatures, but this was soon pared down to just one type of alien” (AVP Fandom).

What resulted was one of the most iconic action movie casts of all time and a film that tops just about everything for over-the-top action, likable characters, and genuine suspense, and arguably one of the two best action/scifi/horror flicks of all time (Aliens being the other). When cast, Arnold immediately insisted on hiring Svento handle his on-set gym, which he had shipped to Mexico in tractor trailers, and added Sven to the cast as a stunt man and extra for good measure. They then put together a group of the most physically imposing actors with military experience ever assembled and headed to the sweltering hellscape of the Mexican jungle.

Prior to shooting the cast was put through two weeks of military training/retraining with Gary Goldman, who commanded a rifle company in Vietnam, then worked in special operations on subsequent tours:

“The first thing I wanted to do was see if these guys actually had what it takes to make it look like they’re in special operations, so I took them out for a run. I was looking at these guys, and most of them were pretty big guys. But in combat, if you can’t run, you’re f—ed. It doesn’t matter how many inches your neck is. So we’re out running on the road, and they got strung out pretty good. I’d look back at [Arnold] every now and then, and I thought, “I’ve got to hand it to him, he’s trying, he’s keeping up.” And then I realized, wait a minute, I’m running on a Mexican road with cars on it, and I’ve got this million-dollar star out here, I’d better be careful. So I started running wide around the curbs so I could see the oncoming traffic. We got back to the hotel and everybody was really silent, they just went straight to their rooms. I thought, “These guys are finished.” And I thought that was pretty funny” (Hyson).

After a week in the shit with Jesse Ventura acting as rear guard to offer additional critiques, the team was ready to start filming. They’d all been training for the film, but when they arrived and saw the condition in which everyone else arrived, a good, old fashioned, testosterone-drenched, multi-week bodybuilding competition under the worst possible conditions emerged. The entire film was shot while sore as shit from the gym, trying not to shit their pants, dodging the poisonous snakes and insects that apparently fill every inch of the Mexican jungle, and everyone was constantly covered with sores from bug bites, scrapes, and falls incurred during shooting, so much so that Richard Chaves had to wear long sleeves the entire time to cover the effects of the flora and fauna on his skin.

Arnold detailed the brutality of the conditions thusly:

“I took more abuse in Predator than I did in Conan the Barbarian,” said Schwarzenegger, according to an interview he did with the sci-fi/fantasy magazine Cinefantastique. “I fell down that waterfall [40′] and swam in this ice-cold water for days and for weeks was covered in mud. It was freezing in the Mexican jungle. They had these heat lamps on all the time, but they were no good. If you stayed in front of the lamps, the mud dried. Then, you had to take it off and put new mud on again. It was a no-win situation. The location was tough. Never on flat ground. Always on a hill. We stood all day long on a hill, one leg down, one leg up. It was terrible.”

Bill Duke, who went on to star alongside Arnold a year later in Commando, added

“We’re talking about hot heat — and humid heat. We’re not talking about 80°,” Duke told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re talking about 90-something or more. We’re talking about having to wear this gear that is heavy itself, and then the guns and stuff, and mine was like a gun off a battleship machine gun [the M134 minigun, in its lightweight version, weighed 62 pounds (the new version created for the cartels is only 41 pounds)]. So you’re carrying your bodyweight, you have clothing on, and then you’re crawling through the jungle on your stomach and there are coral snakes and spiders and scorpions and a lot of different things” (Jussim).

Fun Fact: The real-life goblin spider species Predatoroonops  is named after characters in Predator (plus crew members), due to the similarity between the spider’s evil and terrifying mouth and the Predator’s nasty, slobbery grill. The one pictured above is one of two eight-limbed monstrosities named after the Oak, Predatoroonops dutch (the other is called P. schwarzeneggeri).

So imagine those conditions, in addition to the fact the hotel’s water purification system broke and everyone on set got Montezuma’s Revenge- Arnold was not the only person to shit his pants during filming. So, these motherfuckers were so filled with testosterone, bluster, and bravado that they turned the set of Predator into a bodybuilding competition that ran continuously from March to June. They would run for a half hour to an hour before training in the morning, then lift in Arnold’s gym until their eyes bled (an hour to an hour and a half), then shoot all day in hellish conditions, then lift and run again.

“I think it was Arnold that kept saying (in Arnold voice) ‘manly men.’ You had that cast, and those guys were all pretty impressive. Then you had all the stuntmen who had to double these guys and do all of the stunts. So every morning you had all of these stuntmen and all the cast down there trying to get a good pump on. It was kind of comical, these guys are all trying to outdo each other” (Jussim).

Arnold and Sven went door to door, screaming for everyone to get their asses out of bed and down to the gym As the shoot progressed and competition became more heated, that wake up call got to be earlier and earlier, and guys like Jesse Ventura and Carl Weathers started playing mind games with the other guys to amp up the insanity even further. Whereas Weathers began getting up at three to train, then go back to bed and just do pushups and pullups for a pump before he hit the set, so that everyone thought his muscle was just “natural.” Ventura went a different route, getting to the gym slightly earlier than everyone else and dousing himself in sweat, to make it look as though he’d already been killing himself for an hour when everyone arrived to get their lift in (Hyson).

Not everyone was on board with the weight room shenanigans, however.

“Before we shot every day, Arnold and [Sven] and all of the big boys, they got up an hour and a half before breakfast and trained,” actor Bill Duke told The Hollywood Reporter for its oral history of Predator on the 30th anniversary. “It was this gigantic gym that Arnold shipped to Mexico in these gigantic trucks so that the [hotel] ballroom, that was our gym. Arnold once knocked on my door at 5:30, woke me up. I started lifting with them and they all would start yelling at me to lift more weights and more reps. And that night, I was in so much pain that the next morning when they came to my door and started banging, I pretended that I slept through it so that I wouldn’t have to lift with them anymore” (Jussim).

I’ll wrap up this beast in Part 3, which is necessary because it’s already written and took this article to 4400 words, and eleven pages is too goddamned many for an article. If you couldn’t already tell, my research has gone into serious overdrive, and it seems I am incapable of pulling back from the brink of researching everything to death, so prepare for some heady information dumps going forward. Until then, keep your fucking wits about you- conspiracy theories are created for and by the mentally weak, so if you have one to share, do so with your therapist, not your neighbors in real life or on the goddamned internet.

Seriously- do your level best to be less of a piece of shit, because at this point all anyone is going to remember of most of you is insipid memes and whatever personal failings you broadcast to the world via social media. Be more like Sven and less like everyone else.

Sources:

Andersen, Jesper Fjeldgaard. Sven-Ole Thorsen: Karateka for life. Karate History. 16 Feb 2012. Web. 6 Apr 2020. https://karatehistorie.dk/interviews/sven-ole-thorsen/

Bura Sensei: Chief instructor of JKA Denmark.  JKA Denmark.  Web.  6 Apr 2020.  http://www.jka.dk/bura_sensei_in_english.htm

Find, Thomas. Bringing down the hammer with Sven-Ole Thorsen. The Arnold Fans. 10 May 2018. Web. 5 Apr 2020. http://www.thearnoldfans.com/news/2018/5/10/bringing-down-the-hammer-with-sven-ole-thorsen.html

Henneberg, Brian.  The Danish fitness history – part 3 mussetruss.  26 May 2013.  Web.  8 Apr 2020.  https://www.bodybuilding.dk/apropos.php?page=77

Hewitt, Chris.  Arnie Killed Me! Schwarzenegger’s victims speak… Empire Online.  6 May 2016.  Web.  12 Apr 2020.  https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/arnie-killed-schwarzenegger-victims-speak/

Hyson, Sean.  Old-school ass kicker: Jesse Ventura.  Muscle and Fitness.  Web.  5 Apr 2020.  https://www.muscleandfitness.com/athletes-celebrities/news/old-school-ass-kicker-jesse-ventura

If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It – The Making of Predator.  Produced by Ian T. Haufrect.  20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2001.

Jussim, Matthew.  ‘Predator’ anniversary: 11 amazing things about the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger action film.  Men’s Journal.   https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/predator-30th-anniversary-11-amazing-things-about-classic-arnold-schwarzenegger/11-arnold-was-pumping-iron-during-filmingaea-lot/

Singh, Timon.  Born to be bad: Sven-Ole Thorsen.  Bristol Bad Film Club.  29 Jun 2019.  Web.  11 Apr 2020.  https://bristolbadfilmclub.co.uk/born-to-be-bad-sven-ole-thorsen/

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