In the early 1990s, Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme staged a fake feud and pretended to almost fight with each other. They didn’t come to blows, but the incident did involve some pushing and intense verbal altercation. Although the confrontation suggested that there was a lot of tension between the two stars, none of that was true.
The Rocky IV star and Brussels’ Muscles were two of the biggest action heroes of the 1990s. While they weren’t on the same level of fame as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, they topped a long list of popular action films of the 1990s and 2000s.
One of the cult sci-fi films “Universal Soldier” from 1992 was memorable for both actors: Van Damme as the hero and Lundgren as the villain. Years later, the pair reunited for Universal Soldier: Regeneration in 2009 and teamed up again for Blackwater in 2018.
While their collaboration indicates the actors are on good terms, there was a time in the early 1990s when people thought otherwise—and with good reason.
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At the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, two actors were seen pushing each other. The heated argument, which was in full view of the public, was caught on camera [via YouTube]. The actors’ bodyguards intervened and, apparently, prevented the quarrel from further developing. But according to Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, there was never any risk of a real fight. Apparently, their fake feud at the Cannes Film Festival was staged by Van Damme for publicity.
As Van Damme has explained in the past, the idea came about as a response to Stallone and Schwarzenegger dancing at the previous year’s festival and the media attention it received [via YouTube]. It made Van Damme decide to do his own publicity stunt with Lundgren. He called his Universal Soldier co-star from his hotel in Cannes and suggested that they show some “friction” on the red carpet, believing that it would help publicize their movie, which had completed filming but was still a couple months away from its theatrical release. After Lundgren agreed to Van Damme’s plan, the two started shoved each other on the steps of the Festival Hall.
Just as Van Damme intended, the “fight” instantly grabbed headlines and brought some added attention to Universal Solider from the media. Their fake feud sparked some false rumors of a bitter rivalry between the two action heroes and raised plenty of questions from reporters and television personalities about what prompted their conflict at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. Since then, the actors have been upfront about what really happened. It evolved into a joking matter for both Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who sometimes recount the story behind their Universal Soldier publicity stunt in interviews.