Here's why Van Damme turned down a role in the first 'The Expendables': "I regretted it very much"

Jean-Claude Van Damme was one of the biggest stars of action movies between the late 80s and the first half of the 90s. And as such, Sylvester Stallone did not hesitate to sign him for the first ‘The Expendables’, a project that brought together in the same movie actors of the caliber of Stallone himself, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li or Jason Statham, as a tribute to the usual excess of testosterone in these productions. However, JCVD turned down the offer that Sly made to him personally with a very lame excuse that he later regretted: the Belgian refused the role because he considered his character flat and undeveloped.

Van Damme turned down a role in ‘The Expendables 1′ because his character was “a flat and undeveloped”

Jean-Claude Van Damme himself was the one who revealed in an interview for the medium Filmstalker that he turned down a role in the first film of the saga ‘The Expendables’, directed and starring Sylvester Stallone. Stallone personally offered the role to JCVD, but the Belgian turned it down, claiming that he thought it was “a flat and undeveloped character”. Sly even called Van Damme at the premiere of this movie and told him in a jovial tone “I told you so!”, to which Jean-Claude agreed and immediately expressed his regret.

In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, it was revealed that Van Damme’s role would have been that of Gunner Jensen, which was eventually accepted by Dolph Lundgren, his “enemy” in Universal Soldier. Jensen is a veteran member of The Expendables with addiction problems who temporarily betrays his comrades in the movie in order to redeem himself and rejoin their ranks at the end. Stallone went so far as to claim that Van Damme didn’t want to be Jensen because he lost a fight to Jet Li’s character, something JCVD flatly denies.

However, Van Damme returned in the second film of the saga, released in 2012, where he played the antagonist Jean Vilain, the leader of a group of mercenaries known as The Sangs, who wanted to get their hands on military-grade plutonium to terrorize the world. JCVD was very grateful that Stallone counted on him again, despite his rejection of the previous film.

However, he made it a condition to Stallone that Steven Seagal would not be in this movie, as they did not get along very well due to the negative comments Seagal repeatedly made about JCVD in the 90s.