Dolph Lundgren wears a Panerai Submersible

Early in The Expendables 2, Gunner Jensen asks for a pen and announces that he has improved on Einstein's theory of special relativity. Barney Ross explains: believe it or not, before Gunner became chemically unbalanced, he went to MIT, had a Master's degree in chemical engineering. This idiot actually had a brain. What happened? He quit to be a bouncer. Gunner gives the reason himself: he wanted to get close to a girl who danced at a disco. The script pays the setup off late in the film, when Gunner reads the chemistry out of a wall of phosphate rock, density 1.852, melting point 44.2 Centigrade, calls for gunpowder, and builds a bomb. Someone says it out loud: the man is a chemical engineer, right? And a Fulbright scholar.

The joke is built from Dolph Lundgren's actual resume. He took a chemical engineering degree at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and a master's at the University of Sydney in 1982, and in 1983 he won a Fulbright scholarship to MIT. While he was preparing for Boston, Grace Jones hired him out of the Sydney nightclub where he worked to be her bodyguard; the two became lovers, he moved with her to New York, and when he finally reached MIT he lasted two weeks before quitting to act. His breakthrough came as Ivan Drago in Rocky IV in 1985. By the time The Expendables 2 shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the fall of 2011, the chemical engineer had been an action star for almost three decades.

The bronze watch on his left wrist, worn over a fingerless glove, is the Panerai Luminor Submersible 1950 3 Days Automatic Bronzo, reference PAM00382, the first Panerai sports watch made entirely of bronze. The alloy is 92 percent copper and 8 percent tin, and it darkens into its own patina as it is worn; the dial is green, the case 47mm, the run a thousand pieces starting in 2011. Stallone, a longtime Panerai devotee, issued one to each Expendable: Lundgren, Statham, Crews, Couture, and himself, and nobody in the cast paid for theirs. Stallone's own example sold at Sotheby's in 2024, catalogued as screen-worn, with Lundgren named in the lot essay among the co-stars who wore the same watch.