Why has Steven Seagal been absent from The Expendables franchise? It’s supposed to be an homage to the greatest action stars of the 80s, 90s and today, after all, so why can’t the man who brought us characters like Casey Ryback, Mason Storm and Nico Toscani ever seem to find a spot in Sylvester Stallone’s explosion porn? Hell, even the washed up, shunned and incarcerated like Jean Claude Van Damme, Mel Gibson and Wesley Snipes can get second chances alongside Stallone and Dolph Lundgren, so why? WHY?!?! The public demands to have answers.
Is it because Seagal is an arrogant old coot who thinks that the art of fighting begins and ends with him? Is it because he’d rather hang out with his buddy Vladimir Putin than play shoot ‘em up with Sly and Arnold Schwarzenegger? Does it all revolve around a love triangle with Cynthia Rothrock at the center? Anything is possible. According to his recent interview with The Big Issue, though, Seagal simply doesn’t get along with… someone.
Why have you never been in an Expendables film? I just didn’t like some of the people involved.
The cast is made up of so many people I guess you couldn’t like all of them. Life is too short to work with funny people.
Would you like to name any names? Of course not. There’s good and bad people everywhere and a lot of people in The Expendables I like too. So it’s okay.
Have you thought of assembling your own team and taking them on? That might happen.
Who would be on your dream action team? I like Jason Statham. I like Jet Li, people like that.
Would you have to be the leader though? No I don’t care, I don’t have any ego about that. I’m just a simple country boy. (Via The Big Issue)
Back in December, Seagal told IGN that he didn’t end up taking a role in The Expendables 3 after speaking to Stallone about it because “certain folks, not the actors” got in the way. That was a little more positive than the story that Stallone told back in 2010 about how he tried to get Van Damme and Seagal in the first Expendables movie, but neither of them were interested at the time. Van Damme’s mind obviously changed for The Expendables 2, and he’s even said that he’d like to come back for The Expendables 4 to play the twin brother of Vilain.
As for the era before The Expendables, there was a rumor about this “one time” that Stallone slammed Seagal up against a wall because the latter said that he wouldn’t ever associate with Stallone and “his type,” referring to macho action stars. And even before that anecdote, Stallone told a story to Ain’t It Cool News about how he was partying with Van Damme, Seagal, Shaquille O’Neal, Don Johnson and Madonna (or Tuesday, as they called it back then), when Van Damme had finally had enough of Seagal’s ego and challenged him to a fight two times in the same night.
So did any of these stories have something to do with Seagal turning down The Expendables 3? Yes, all of them. The end.