Sylvester Stallone reveals explosive on-set brawl with Richard Gere after threatening to ‘knock his teeth out’

DAILYMAIL.COM • 2d ago

By SAMEER SURI, US SENIOR SHOWBUSINESS REPORTER 18:36 06 Oct 2026, updated 18:47 06 Oct 2026

Sylvester Stallone has recalled a feud with Richard Gere that escalated into a physical brawl on the 1974 film The Lords of Flatbush.

Their animosity was born during the auditions, when an ad-lib session with Gere went so pear-shaped that Stallone threatened to ‘knock his teeth out.’

When the shoot began, their equation deteriorated even further, to the point that a fight broke out between the two men over lunch.

Gere spilled chicken grease over Stallone, triggering a physical confrontation so intense the director had to plant himself between them.

The enmity between the two men reached such a fever pitch that they became incapable of acting together and Gere was replaced by Perry King.

‘It was clear to everyone that this wasn’t working,’ Stallone explained in his newly published memoir The Steps. ‘One of us had to go.’

The Daily Mail has contacted Gere’s representatives for comment.

Directed by Stephen F Verona and Martin Davidson, The Lords of Flatbush was a low-budget comedy about blue collar toughs in 1950s Brooklyn.

I’m Andrew Court, LA Showbiz Editor and celebrity connoisseur.

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Stallone’s audition process for the film involved not only Gere but also Robert De Niro, who was shortly to become a bona fide star in The Godfather Part II.

In his new memoir, Stallone maintained that ‘everything went pretty well initially with me and De Niro’ and that he ‘enjoyed improvisation and the process of ad-libbing.’

However his attempts at improvising with Gere took an infelicitous turn ‘when Gere grabbed my T-shirt and his fingernails dug into my skin.’

Stallone wrote: ‘I told him to back off, but he did it again on the second take. He couldn’t have known, but Gere had begun to stir the emotional cauldron inside me.’

In the moment, Stallone asked Verona: ‘Is it okay if I ad-lib here and react the way I would actually react if someone did that to me in real life?’

When Verona inquired as to what precisely he would do, Stallone replied: ‘Do? I’d knock his teeth out,’ and was advised: ‘Please don’t.’

Matters came to a head during a lunch break, when Stallone goaded Gere to not make a mess, whereupon Gere allegedly dropped part of his dish on him.

‘A stream of chicken grease spilled off the foil paper onto my leg. I elbowed him across the chest, got out of the car, came around to his side, and pulled him out of the back seat,’ the Rocky icon remembered.

‘Hey, man, I don’t want to get physical,’ Gere purportedly pleaded in what Stallone characterized in his book as a ‘thin voice.’

‘Too late…,’ Stallone claimed to have replied, only for the altercation to be broken up by Verona placing himself in front of Gere.

Gere left the film, and so – for apparently unrelated reasons – did De Niro, whose replacement Henry Winkler became close friends with Stallone.

Two decades after The Lords of Flatbush was made, Gere and Stallone reportedly came nearly to blows once again, this time over Princess Diana.

Elton John wrote in his memoir that the incident unfolded in 1994 at a fete thrown in London during Diana’s separation from Prince Charles.

According to John, Gere and Diana ‘seemed very taken with each other,’ to the chagrin of Stallone, whom John suspected of having ‘turned up to the party with the express intention of picking Diana up, only to find his plans for the evening ruined.’

Gere and Stallone are said to have reached the stage of ‘squaring up to each other, apparently about to settle their differences over Diana by having a fist-fight’ that John’s eventual husband David Furnish was supposedly able to avert.

John recalled that Gere and Diana then ‘resumed their position in front of the fire,’ while Stallone ‘stormed off home,’ fuming that he ‘never would have come’ had he known ‘Prince f***in’ Charming was gonna be here.’

The equation between the two movie stars remained fraught enough that Stallone has had to publicly deny being the source of the unsubstantiated Hollywood rumor about Gere checking into the hospital to have a gerbil extracted from his rectum.

Stallone claimed that Gere ‘thinks I’m the individual responsible for the gerbil rumor,’ though he disputed that he was the culprit, via Ain’t It Cool.

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