It was 2006, and Rocky Balboa was coming back for the very last time. But strangely, Talia Shire was nowhere in sight.
Well, it wasn’t exactly the last time. Rocky came back for Creed in 2015 and Creed 2 three years after that. There was another decade and change left of gas in the Rocky tank, with plans for a prequel series constantly making the rounds on social media a further five years after that. At the time, though, Rocky Balboa seemed, if not final, nudging firmly against the penultimate.
And it made sense. Rocky had spent the last three movies being told that he’d die if someone punched him hard enough. Diminishing returns had hit the franchise like it was a frozen cut of beef. The Soviet Union had fallen. The franchise had run so dry on ideas that it accidentally spawned the idea for Predator when the writers joked about Rocky running out of people to beat up on Earth.
So one last hurrah seemed like the way to go. Redemption and closure were all that was left for Philadelphia’s most inscrutable boxer. Catching up with Balboa 16 years after Rocky V, we learned that the character was mired in loss. His son hated him, his career as a fighter was long over, and, most jarringly, his loving wife Adrian was no longer saying “You’re gonna get yourself killed out there” every ten minutes, on account of her being quite dead.
This came, of course, as a shock to longtime fans of the series. Adrian was an irreplaceable part of the Rocky franchise and had retained that spot for 30 years. She was played by Talia Shire, the actress whom Sylvester Stallone has called his “greatest leading lady ever.” Were we really to believe that science could give us that robot butler from Rocky IV, but not save Adrian from aggressive metastatic cancer?
In a long-since archived interview with USA Today, published not long after Rocky Balboa premiered, Stallone explained that sweet Adrian hadn’t always been doomed to die offscreen. Keeping Rocky’s life partner alive “just didn’t have the same dramatic punch,” he said.
“I thought, ‘What if she’s gone?’ That would cut Rocky’s heart out and drop him down to ground zero.,” Stallone continued. Longtime Paulie actor Burt Young claimed to have had a hand in his fictional sister’s demise, and noted that “Adrian’s probably more prevalent by not being in this movie than if she was.”
For her part, Talia Shire took the development in stride. Attending the Rocky Balboa premiere, she put it better than anyone: “Sly utilizes mourning to empower Rocky, and Adrian is made very mythical.” Asked if she cried during the screening, she stated:
“I lost a button on my blouse because I had an explosive moment in the boxing ring (scene), because I felt that fight was really about a man going up against time and love and courage. Adrian wasn’t there, but she was very much within him.”
Yo, Adrian. You’re making us emotional.