Carl Weathers

Carl Weathers came to acting from professional football, which he played in the United States and then in Canada, and the athlete's body language never left him. It won him the part that defined him: Apollo Creed, the showboating champion of the first four Rocky films between 1976 and 1985. Creed could easily have been a punchline, a loud man in stars and stripes. Weathers played him as a promoter who happened to be a fighter, someone who understood publicity better than his opponent did, and across the sequels he turned the rivalry into something warmer than the scripts alone earned.

What he was specifically good at was authority without strain. He rarely raised his voice. In Predator he is the one member of the unit running an agenda rather than a mission, and he communicates it mostly by declining to explain himself. In Happy Gilmore he plays Chubbs Peterson, a golf pro with one hand and a wooden replacement, completely straight while the film collapses into slapstick around him, which is exactly why the character is funny. The same discipline holds in the Toy Story films, where Combat Carl is a plastic soldier voiced with total conviction.

He directed as well as acted, and the late stretch of his career handed him one more signature role: Greef Karga, the guild magistrate in The Mandalorian, which brought an Emmy nomination for guest actor. Along the way he headlined Action Jackson in 1988 and played a gloriously petty version of himself on Arrested Development. He died in 2024, after close to fifty years of work, and the volume of tribute made clear how much goodwill a supporting player can accumulate when he is never once caught coasting.