Plague of Strength

As you can imagine on a movie the size of Predator, there were more aggressive, muscular, sweaty, and oiled dudes than you’d see at a Gay Pride parade leather dungeon afterparty. There were two separate stunt teams, one Mexican and one US/Australian (iery little on the set of that film went smoothly, and the Mexican government seems to have only made matters worse), that brought the potential number of lifters in the gym to over 50 a day. To gain entry, one had only to bring Sven a single bottle of champagne for a key (Arnold took everything in payment for bets lost to gym entry and everything in between in the form of champagne), and they could then train at any time of the day they wanted. Once there, they joined one of the most jacked bunches of gym-goers the world has ever seen, Gold’s Venice and Bev Francis’s Powerhouse notwithstanding.

“We all have a story to tell and we all have our inferiority complexes. And I had many of them as a young man, and I tried to hide them behind my great physique – they have followed me all my life. I, as a stuntman, said yes to big tasks, and later doubted if I had the talent to do the job.”

Sven-Ole Thorsen (obviously)

When he wasn’t bullshitting around onset with Arnold and his stunt/body double Peter Kent, smoking cigars and telling jokes, Sven was in charge of the setup of the gym, ensuring the gym was stocked and ran smoothly, collecting bottles of champagne in exchange for keys to the gym, and putting Arnold through his paces on the weights. Bill Duke actually referred to Sven as Arnold’s trainer more than once, which gives you some idea of the serious-as-a-heart-attack respect the greatest bodybuilder on the planet at the time had for Sven’s work ethic, knowledge base, and physical strength.

Carl Weathers

At 6’2″ and two-hundred-twenty peeled-as-fuck pounds, this former Oakland Raider was such a fucking badass in the ring Muhummad Ali publicly requested a sparring match after seeing Weathers in Rocky. Unlike much of the cast, Weathers didn’t have any military experience, though he directed and acted in some training films with the US military two decades after the release of Predator. Military service took a backseat to a Rocky tie-in, plus he was jacked as hell and a former athlete, so his physical presence combined with his acting skills more than made up for the fact he hadn’t been involved in the essentially pointless invasion of Grenada or whatever. Frankly, that was likely a boon given the fact that the Army had been issuing comic books about weapon maintenance to soldiers in the early 80s (created by comic book legend and father of the graphic novel Will Eisner) because enlistment standards had been lowered to the point that many enlistees were barely literate, so reading the script might have been an issue for many ex-military men of that era.

Tony Brubaker

Brubaker stood 6’4″ and although I could find nothing on his weight (stuntmen are like fucking ghosts in Hollywood, it seems, and finding information on them is damn near impossible), he was jacked enough to be Michael Clarke Duncan’s stunt double in both Daredevil and The Scorpion King, and Mr. T’s double on the A-Team. Brubaker is also insanely athletic (he’s a hell of a horseman), so keeping up with him in the gym was likely daunting.

Jesse “The Body” Ventura

“The Body” hardly needs an introduction. Ventura stood 6’4″ at the time, and claimed to have weighed 265 pounds during the filming of Predator. Ventura was an Underwater Demolition Team 12 member during Vietnam (though he did not see combat) and a reservist in Seal Vehicle Delivery Team 1 (SDVT-1) for a few years thereafter. Additionally, he was a WWE Superstar from 1975 to 1986, then was included in the WWE Hall of Fame in 2004. The man was as physical as they come, and his cardio was just as serious as his muscle mass. Ventura seemed to borrow from his UDT training (he predated the SEALs and never went to BUDS) at every opportunity, both on set and afterward, to the point that even when coaching high school football he was a near-certifiable animal.

“My son went to Champlin Park High School. He wasn’t an athlete and didn’t play but I felt that because schools always need help I would offer my expertise. I volunteered and was not paid and I was the conditioning coach. I ran it just like Navy SEAL BUD’s training. I was about 45 at the time. I used to take the kids on runs and some of them told me later that they ran into the bushes and puked. But they didn’t want to do it in front of me. I would take them out to this storm-water retention pond and have them wade through waist-deep water. Then they’d do pushups with their faces in the water all day long. I grew them as a team and taught them to rely on each other. By the end of the year every kid on the team could do at least one pullup (Hyson).

If you’re unsatisfied with the level of insanity one needs to display to be a bodybuilding SDVT member who stole a great wrestling gimmick from Classy Freddie Blassie (who interestingly was a WW2 vet)- he was also a fucking Mongol. That’s right- Jesse Ventura headed the chapter of a one percenter motorcycle club and even wore his colors on base before quitting the service. In essence, Ventura was to the hardest motherfucker in your gym what a cartoon duck on a preschool cartoon show is to one of the many necrophiliac rapist ducks observed engaging in bestiality with other special of dead animals in the wild. The hardest dude at your gym would look more like Pee Wee Herman than a badass lifter if he’d his the gym with peak condition Jesse “The Body” Ventura.

Arnold

Another dude who needs no introduction, Arnold was for all intents and purposes the captain of the Predator team, and everyone looked to him for inspiration on the weights he used in training (Jesse was thoroughly underwhelmed). Making him even more ideal for the role is the fact that he served a year of compulsory military service in Austria. Rather than being the sort of light infantry he portrayed in Predator, the Oak served in a tank division and apparently enjoyed the hell out of it, as he now owns the same type of tank on which he trained in the 60s- an M47 Patton.

Peter Kent

Arnold’s body double, stood 6’3″ and weighed about what Arnold did.  Kent was in practically every movie Arnold was in, and the two trained together to ensure his dimensions more or less matched those of the Oak. After the Terminator, the two of them trained together daily for almost 15 years. Though it has no bearing on his training methods (we all know Arnold’s training methods inside and out, I’m sure), Kent was the first stunt double to wear facial prosthetics to better match the actor he was doubling, so his training and physique had to be at least as perfect as the prosthetics he wore.

Sonny Landham (b. 1941- d. 2017)

Landham was six feet and three inches of lean, drunk, angry Native American vet and former porn star muscle who was so fucking mean that the studio initially couldn’t get insurance for the film. It ended up that the insurance company would only insure the film with him in it if they hired a gigantic goon to protect the big-ass, ex-military, professional athletes of the cast from Landham.  The goon must’ve trained with them as well, added another 6’8″ of height and the approximate weight of a dump truck to the ton of sweaty man meat already in that gym..

A couple other notable guys in that gym were:

• Monty Jordan– 6′ tall, burly, wise-cracking, maniac stuntman who’d flown helicopters on two and a half tours in Vietnam and was later a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. The man doesn’t even have a pic on IMBD, but he was big enough to be Jesse Ventura’s stunt double in this flick.
• Steve Boyum, who at 6’1″ and 210 pounds wasn’t the biggest dude onset, but he was likely the fittest.  A proto-extreme sports maniac, Boyum was a world-class ski jumper, surfer, and ski racer who’d done stunts on Apocalypse Now. As you can see from the pic of him as a hostage in Predator above, he was no stranger to the gym when they were in Mexico.
• Richard Chaves, the little guy of the bunch at 5’9″ and around 165 pounds.  Chaves was the on-set gym project of Sven-Ole and Arnold, who had Chaves’ arms by far and away the biggest they were in his life. If you look at Chaves at any other point in his career, it looks like a stiff wind could be fatal to the diminutive and half-starved-looking Chaves, but on Predator he looked very much like a dude who could run a marathon and then join a bar fight at the end of it.
• Kevin Peter Hall, who played the Predator, was George Washington University’s starting center his junior and senior years and towered over the rest of the cast at 7’2″ after replacing Jean Claude van Damme in the eponymous role. Hall had three stunt doubles onset, plus a completely uncredited replacement for reshoots whose last name seems to be unknown, and all of them were likely in the gym at various times as well, but Hall in particular trained right alongside Arnold and Sven during shooting.
• Franco Columbo, who’d joined Sven and Arnold on Conan, has an uncredited cameo in Predator. There’s no real information on how long Franco was on set, but given the fact he and Arnold were besties and Franco was in Terminator and the Running Man as well, it stands to reason that little 190 pound pile of cross-striated pectoral muscle was hanging out, eating his face off, and getting drunk with the boys much like Sven was.

Following Predator, Sven found himself included in damn near every movie production that either required Arnold or a random scary jacked dude, ranging from the Running Man to Overboard to Pink Cadillac to Cyborg 2 to Mallrats and Gladiator, never once learning how to act worth a shit. He took plenty of lessons in regards to stunt- everything from driving to being on fire, but never managed to learn the fine art of acting, not that it hurt his career in any way.

“I am no actor, I am just Sven.”

He went on to be in an on-again, off-again open relationship Dolph’s ex, Grace Jones, for a number of years after divorcing his snake charmer, and is now in an open marriage with Swedish chef and entrepreneur Birgitta Sunding Thorsen. Karate and lifting are still major fixtures in his life, and in addition to training with katas and the makiwara (the wooden man you see in kung fu movies) in his backyard on a daily basis, he brings his dogs with him to the dojo and the gym (though one of the ones he mentions is sadly now dead).

“I develop my karate a couple of times a week under a JKA instructor my own age, James Field. I go with my two sausages, Jacki and Cleo, every day at 7 for an hour and afterwards spend an hour in in the hot tub, where I paddle and kick in the water.

Afterwards a bit of a stretch and then there is breakfast at Rose Cafe Venice. Other mornings, I train weight training at Gold Gym, followed by breakfast” (Andersen).

I had a dream with Erik Holmey [pictured left], who is 72 years old today. He still trains twice a week in Denmark. When we got old, we would go to a subway station and dress like old men, and when there were violent people, we would take off our coats and then give them a little “trouble”.

In summary, Sven-Ole Thorsen is one of the coolest motherfuckers to ever walk the planet, and I daresay his story is even more compelling than the Oak’s, all things considered. He still walks around looking for young whippersnappers who are stepping out of line so he can trash them with some karate, so should you find yourself in Santa Monica, be sure not to fuck with LaFours. If you take nothing else away from this man’s story, I would say it should be the fact that no matter how hard he partied, how many chicks he was fucking at a time, what the conditions were on a shoot or in a meet, or anything else life could throw at him, Sven-Ole Thorsen was disciplined as hell in his training and his life, and that discipline is what he credits with his success.

Thus, when asked what he’d like to be remembered for, he replied:

“For being a man of discipline.“

Though I confess I will always remember him as Lafours first and foremost.

Up next, we get back into hardcore training methods with a couple of installments from the Nothing New Under the Sun series about isometrics, including at least one article on proto-powerlifter Bill March, who based his training on isometrics. Seems like an appropriate time to rock a series on them, because it looks like we’re all going to have to become pretty creative with training methods over the course of the next 18 months, if the CDC and the Fed are any indication (which they are). And seriously, I don’t give a fuck about your conspiracy theories about any of this shit, as I am writing an article specifically to address those theories and the weakness of mind and character that science has identified as their root. Feel free to share them in the comments, but just know that uttering a conspiracy theory is like writing “I have a limp dick/ladydick” on your forehead, and I will mock the fucking shit out of you for being ignorant and weak.

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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