Lundgren had first tasted notoriety a few years earlier as the boy-toy of the equally exotic black pop chanteuse Grace Jones. The two made a striking pair on the early 1980s NYC club scene: Jones deliciously dark, fierce and feral with the ice cool blond Lundgren, bare-chested and clad only in tight leather pants. This was undoubtedly a heady experience for a twentysomething Swedish chemical engineering student (he had earned his MA from the University of Sydney) who had been working as a doorman and bouncer at several trendy nightclubs just months before.
That Jones played one of the villains in Roger Moore's last Bond outing probably helped her boyfriend make it in front of the camera. Nevertheless, his own impressive attributes paved the way for his subsequent success. In 1987, Lundgren made his entry into the lucrative exercise video with "Maximum Potential", a take-no-prisoners workout based on his own daily regimen. His next theatrical release gave him his first starring role as Lundgren embodied He-Man, a muscle-bound Mattel action figure, with amusing verisimilitude in the kiddie sci-fi actioner "Masters of the Universe" (1987). While the project made money, its success did nothing to enhance Lundgren's status as a leading man. Nor did the subsequent blood-splattered heroic comic-book outings "Red Scorpion" (1989), in which he played a conflicted Russian agent; "The Punisher" (also 1989), as Marvel Comics' popular vigilante anti-hero; nor "I Come in Peace" (1990), a sci-fi thriller in which he was a human cop tracking down alien fugitives.
The mayhem was a bit more character-driven in the well-crafted if unintentionally racist cop drama "Showdown in Little Tokyo" (1991) but most agreed that the big, dour Swede paled all the more beside his compact but charismatic co-star Brandon Lee. As if chastened by the experience, Lundgren was downright lively when paired with a winningly robotic Jean-Claude Van Damme in the diverting "Universal Soldier" (1992), helmed by a pre-"Independence Day" Roland Emmerich. His reputation as a second-string action hero was secure though he enjoyed far greater success overseas than in the US.
Unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lundgren was a trained athlete rather than a bodybuilder. Unlike Van Damme, he was an award-winning world-class martial artist. Unlike all of his tough-guy contemporaries, Lundgren was also an academic whiz who was accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Fulbright scholar before being lured to the limelight. Still his intelligence won him no respect. His Aryan good looks, Swedish accent, stiff performance style and poor choice of early roles kept him off the action A-list.
In 1993, Lundgren formed his own production company, Thor Pictures and made his debut as an executive producer the following year with "Pentathalon", a character-driven adventure about a star East German pentathlete who defects to the US. While training for the role, he met and befriended several of the top US modern pentathletes. Tiring of Hollywood, Lundgren moved with wife back to NYC in 1994 where he became involved with the Ensemble Studio Theater. He even formed his own theater company, Group of Eight.
Lundgren next turned up in a relatively high-profile "Johnny Mnemonic" (1995), as the crazed, messianic Street Preacher, a hitman tracking Keanu Reeves. Never before had his performance style been so over-the-top. Lundgren also used his celebrity to champion his adopted countrymen as the official team leader of the US modern pentathlon squad at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.