Before he was famous, Sylvester Stallone worked as a lion cage cleaner. For one of the biggest action stars of the big screen over the last four decades, was this just the early training days of a real tough guy? Unfortunately not, and it all happened at one of the toughest points in his life.
Anyone who was alive during the 1980’s and 90’s knows that there were only two real action stars. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. While Schwarzenegger certainly worked hard to build his career, the path for him to stardom was a much smoother ride than the road that Stallone traveled. To tell you the truth, Stallone knows just how hard life can get, and had to do some pretty crappy things just to survive. One such thing that Sylvester Stallone did was work as a lion cage cleaner.
So that doesn’t sound all that bad or degrading when compared to his first acting role. But the reality is that it was much worse. While his first acting role was pretty foul for most people, at least it paid a bit better than his job cleaning lion cages, and it was much cleaner.
In 1969, at the age of only 22, a young man was struggling to survive. Like most people, he had dreams and ambitions, but a lack of funds to allow him to fully pursue them. Even though he wanted to be an actor, survival was far more important, so Sylvester Stallone got a job as a lion cage cleaner at Central Park Zoo. Even though the job doesn’t seem that bad, he was paid only $1.12 an hour to collect the poop out of the enclosures. Yeah, that made it a little worse, didn’t it? But if having to collect the feces of the king of the jungle wasn’t bad enough, on a regular basis the lions would urinate on him. All that for a little more than a dollar an hour.
So the next time that you are feeling down about your life or your job, take note of Sylvester Stallone and use him as inspiration. He struggled through pure adversity to become a huge Hollywood actor. So never give up.
