Frank Grillo: The Fight of His Life

Actor Frank Grillo is a real-life action hero who's ready to save Hollywood.

- Sean Hyson

There’s a 50-year-old man sitting across from me who looks like he could take my head off with one clean shot. Frank Grillo, who plays the supervillain Crossbones in this summer’s Captain America: Civil War, is having lunch, and with each slice of his knife through the grilled salmon on the plate in front of him, the vein in his swollen biceps leaps from his skin. But that’s nothing compared with the veins on the right side of his neck: They look like the hydraulic cylinders that help the Terminator turn his head.

To compare Grillo to a machine, particularly a killing machine, is neither a swipe at the guy nor an embellishment. Consider that he gets up at 6 a.m. daily to travel to one of L.A.’s premier boxing gyms, where he’ll put in two hours of training, including sparring sessions with professional fighters. Then he’ll go film either his MMA themed TV show, Kingdom, or the next installment of one of his huge movie franchises—The Purge series or Captain America—and then he’s back home at night to be a husband and dad to three kids. “My wife used to ask me, ‘Why are you always fighting?’” says Grillo with a smile. “I said, ‘I don’t know, but there’s a reason.’”

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