Whatever Happened To Carl Weathers?

In Hollywood, an actor can work steadily and make good money for years, even decades, but all it takes is a single memorable role in a box-office smash to transform them from a vaguely familiar face into a star. The problem sets in when audiences latch onto a performance so strongly that they expect the actor to look, act, and sound the same way in every project from then on out, never taking into account their range as an actor or considering the fact that people look different as they grow older.

Carl Weathers is a perfect example of this problem: he became a household name as a result of playing boxer Apollo Creed throughout the first four films of the "Rocky" franchise, so much so that the average movie fan still sees Weathers in their mind's eye as the man he was in those films. Given that the first "Rocky" film came out in 1976, if you can cut Weathers some slack for failing to maintain his fighting weight for the last 40 years, then we can help fill in the blanks as to what he's been doing since Ivan Drago took him down in "Rocky IV." Here's a hint: he's been hiding in plain sight.

Until his death in February 2024, the actor led a few projects. But the biggest came at the front and end of his career, in "Rocky" and "Predator" and, much later, in "The Mandalorian." Weathers hadn't gone anywhere between those big-budget projects, though — here's what he'd been up to in the interim.

Unfortunately, the emphasis is very much on "potential" in this instance, since neither motion picture made it past its initial installment. The first of the two — "Action Jackson," released in 1988 — is the one that's most surprising in terms of its failure to secure a second film. "Yeah, people loved 'Action Jackson,'" Carl Weathers told Bullz-Eye in 2009. "I get asked all the time, 'Are you ever going to do a sequel?' I still maintain today that it could've been a better movie had we taken a little bit longer to develop the screenplay, but a lot of people liked it. In Germany, it was huge!" As for his next film, the flop "Hurricane Smith," more people probably know the singer than they do Weathers' 1992 film, which was best summed up by the alternate international title: "Dead on Delivery."

The movies were, of course, major milestones in Weathers' career, but critics didn't look kindly on them. Roger Ebert bemoaned what he thought was a lack of charisma on Weathers' part in "Action Jackson," while both films today have the reputation of being classic hypermasculine '80s and '90s schlock.

Although he's only appeared in a grand total of four episodes over the course of the five seasons (so far) of "Arrested Development," Carl Weathers relished the opportunity to get a little goofy by playing an exaggerated version of himself, one which he has said isn't representative of his real character at all. Series creator Mitch Hurwitz had originally contemplated going in a different direction with Bizarro Carl — one which would've involved a parody of Rocky and Apollo's beach run in "Rocky III"  — but when he asked Weathers if he had any thoughts, Weathers alternately suggested that maybe he could be really cheap. "It was so much better," Hurwitz told Vulture. "I went back to the writers' room and said, 'You're not going to believe this. Carl Weathers wants to be incredibly cheap.' All credit to Carl on that."

Weathers confirmed that the idea to play a total cheapskate was all his. "I was asked, 'If we can craft something for you, what would you like to do?'" he told the Calgary Herald. "I came up with this idea as a result of someone I knew to play a guy, a guy who I call 'the cheapest guy in the world.' They took the note, crafted something that I thought was extremely funny and we went from there."

Even when you weren't seeing Carl Weathers onscreen, you were often hearing him, as he lent his smooth, baritone vocals to a variety of animated and video game projects. After reuniting with his "Happy Gilmore" costar Adam Sandler for the Hanukkah comedy "Eight Crazy Nights," Weathers voiced Kirby in the direct-to-video sequel "Balto III: Wings of Change," the Basketball King on "Regular Show" and Omnitraxus on "Star vs. the Forces of Evil." He also voice acted in several video games, playing Lightman in "The Artful Escape," Jax "Dillon" Skin in "Mortal Kombat X," and Col. Samuel Garrett in "Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction."

Most famously, Weathers parodied his tough guy persona as the voice of Combat Carl — as well as his pint-sized alter ego, Combat Carl, Jr. — in the "Toy Story" franchise. The military action figure made his first appearance in the 2013 video short "Toy Story of Terror!" In the short made-for-TV film, Andy's toys are stolen by the evil motel manager Ron (Stephen Tobolowsky) to be sold online. When Jessie (Joan Cusack) manages to evade capture, she meets the wayward toy Carl. Carl helps Jessie reunite with her toy friends Buzz (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) and rides away with them in the hopes of finding his missing human. Weathers returned to the series in 2019 for "Toy Story 4," which would sadly turn out to be his final big-screen performance.

Between acting jobs, Weathers established himself as a top director of episodic television. Starting in the early 1990s with episodes of "Silk Stalkings" and "Renegades," Weathers became a trusted hired hand on a variety of programs. Among his most prominent credits were installments of "The Last O.G.," "Law & Order," "Chicago Med," and the reboot of "Hawaii Five-O." But perhaps most famously, he helmed two episodes of "The Mandalorian," on which he also starred as bounty hunter Greef Karga.

In a 2023 interview with Hypebeast ahead of the Season 3 finale of "The Mandalorian," Weathers talked about his work behind the camera, saying that as much as he enjoyed acting, he had "fallen in love" with directing. "It allows me to provide my personality and artistic bent," he explained. "There's so much more opportunity to be creative because you're really involved with the entire piece, working on every aspect of it." He found "The Mandalorian" in particular to be "a wonderful sandbox to play in" and expressed interest in helming a movie centered on his character, Greef Karga, which would recount "those formative teenage years" that, like "Solo: A Star Wars Story" does for Harrison Ford's smuggler, influence the character we meet in "The Mandalorian." He added, "I love the issues of the pirates, Empire, resurgences, Moff Gideon — there's so much good stuff in there. Those elements would be fantastic to put into one screenplay to see where Greef Karga ultimately winds up." Sadly, that film never came to fruition during Weathers' life.