Apparently, Sylvester Stallone offered Jean-Claude Van Damme the lead role in the upcoming The Expendables.  Van Damme turned it down because he’s more interested in actual acting these days instead of doing mindless action movies. Good for him, I say; that’d be great if he can build on the critical success of JCVD.  Because to be taken seriously as an actor, Jean-Claude has had to overcome a lot.  Not so much in terms of growing up destitute or something like that, but simply in terms of his image.  To see what I mean, you can check out the nine best Van Damme videos ever below.

Van Damme talks about Steven Segal backing down from a fight at Sylvester Stallone’s house in Miami.  Then he makes fun of Stallone.  I have one question, though – in the subtitles at the bottom, you can see “LOL.”  Does that mean the audience is laughing out loud?  Or did someone actually say “laugh out loud”instead of actually laughing?  I’m going to choose to believe the latter.

Van Damme punches a fake rubber snake (as opposed to a real rubber snake) in Hard Target.  Great acting by Yancy Butler.

Wow.

Van Damme grinds against a woman on television…

Van Damme tells Arsenio Hall about staging a fight with Dolph Lundgren.  Does anyone know about this?  Was it really staged, or did Van Damme get embarrassed and then later say it was staged to avoid shame?  More importantly, look what he is wearing.  On television.  Imagine if someone wore that on Letterman.  How was that acceptable? How did we, as a society, allow that?  Anyway, here – does this look staged?

All I know is that Lundgren went straight into Drago mode.

Just brilliant.  This is better than syncing up The Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon.

I still can’t believe this happened.

Before the days of Frank Dux…

By the way, while compiling these videos, I found this YouTube comment:

what happen 2 his fohead??he allwayz had that ball

That kind of made my night.