Cinema
Steven Seagal turned down $20 million to avoid fighting Van Damme
Both actors were big box-office rivals in the 1990s, and before the 1997 incident in which they almost got into a real fight, there was talk of staging a full-blown fight in Las Vegas.
One of the biggest rivalries between Hollywood stars is that between Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who took their feud off-screen and almost came to blows at a private party at Sylvester Stallone’s house in the late 90s. Seagal was so scarred by the incident that when he was offered a guaranteed fight against Van Damme a few years later, for a whopping $20 million each, the actor still turned it down.
What could have been and what wasn’t: Steven Seagal turned down a fortune because he didn’t want to fight Van Damme
In a 2023 interview with The Telegraph, Jean-Claude Van Damme revealed a previously unknown fact about his history of animosity toward Steven Seagal. According to the Belgian, Peter Guber, who was co-president and CEO of Sony Pictures in the early 90s, wanted to organize a fight between the two at The Mirage casino resort in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Both JCVD and Seagal would have been paid $20 million each, but Steven Seagal refused. Both actors also had real martial arts experience; Van Damme practiced karate and kickboxing, and Seagal aikido, which gave them “tough guy” status off the screen.
These statements by Van Damme did not mention the exact year, but to narrow down the date we have Guber’s own period as head of Sony Pictures Entertainment: it had to be sometime between November 1989 and 1995. This means that the opportunity to organize this event would have coincided with the peak of the popularity of both actors and before the infamous incident in 1997 when an angry JCVD wanted to fight Seagal at a party at Sylvester Stallone’s house in Miami because of the derogatory comments he had made about him.
Seagal’s version of turning down the offer has never been known, although both his refusal and his silence on the matter put him in a very bad position afterward, especially considering that he was the one who initiated the hostilities against Van Damme with comments on a television program implying that JCVD was a fraud as a martial artist.
Steven Seagal’s negative comments to Van Damme on television: the source of their feud
In 1991, Steven Seagal was a guest on Arsenio Hall’s television show, where he made malicious comments about Jean-Claude Van Damme’s legitimate career as a martial artist.
Seagal said things like, “I think that’s a matter of opinion that he [Van Damme] was a champion anywhere,” implying in a not-so-subtle way that JCVD’s record of 18 wins and 1 loss as a federated kick boxer was rigged. “I’m not being catty or anything, I wish the guy all the best, but there are an awful lot of people who will say that that’s not true,” said Seagal.
The next point where the two would cross paths was when Warner Bros. offered both of them to share the lead role in ‘Demolition Man’, offering Seagal the role of the hero and Van Damme the role of the villain. Since both wanted to be the hero, and given the impossibility of reaching an agreement, the producers decided to pass on both and the roles finally went to Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. The movie was released in 1993.
And in 1997 we would reach the climax of their strange relationship when both of them met at a private party at Sylvester Stallone’s residence in Miami. It was a party attended by all kinds of celebrities from the entertainment world, such as Madonna, Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Van Damme got tired of Seagal’s comment that he could “kick his ass” and politely invited him to the courtyard to exchange views. JCVD waited for two hours and Seagal didn’t show up, even leaving the party with an excuse. The Belgian followed Seagal to a nightclub, where he again wanted to fight him, and the “Under Siege” star again refused.
A decade and a half later, Van Damme would exact his own peculiar revenge. After turning down a role in the first ‘The Expendables,’ Stallone still wanted to count on him for the 2012 sequel, which JCVD readily agreed to… but only on one clear condition: that Steven Seagal not appear. Said and done; Van Damme got the role of Jean Vilain, the movie’s villain, and Seagal was nowhere to be seen.
In the present, Van Damme claims to have no problem with Steven Seagal and speaks about their past feud with a certain philosophy, blaming his attitude and comments on “age stuff”. In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2023, he commented that “when you’re young, you want to be the most macho of them all” and justified Seagal’s accusations as a way of marking his territory and being the only rooster in the coop, indirectly threatened by the then-burgeoning success of JCVD.