D.B. Sweeney will be lacing up his skates once again — 34 years after The Cutting Edge gave him heartthrob status.
“I can’t say yet what it’s called, but I think I’m doing a hockey movie in May,” the actor tells Yahoo. “I’ll be playing a hockey coach this time, not a player. We’re just waiting for the final approvals.”
It seems fitting to have this conversation while Sweeney is experiencing a historic ice storm in Nashville, where he’s been working. The actor lost power for three days during the arctic blast, which served as a backdrop for a discussion about his character Doug Dorsey, his current hockey injury and the Winter Olympics.
“Moms pass it to daughters, and daughters pass it to their daughters — it’s been that long now,” he said of the 1992 cult classic film, which saw his blue-collar captain of the U.S. ice hockey team character cross over to Olympic figure skating after sustaining an injury. “There are not that many movies that are unironic and heartfelt — and that’s one of the things it’s got going for it.”
Sweeney at the Megalopolis premiere in 2024.
(Dominik Bindl/WireImage via Getty Images)
Like his costar Moira Kelly, who played figure skating queen Kate Moseley with icy perfection, Sweeney didn’t skate when he was cast. To prepare, the two trained together for three hours a day for three months in New York City, not just learning “toe pick!” but also building chemistry for the love story.
“One of the things that made our relationship in the movie so great is that we learned to skate together,” he says. “We became very competitive with each other.”
That energy fed into their onscreen dynamic — a romance forged in rivalry. Sweeney annoyed Kelly by wearing hockey skates during training when he was supposed to be wearing figure skates, which he found too uncomfortable at the start.
“Every time I went out there during figure skating hours with hockey skates on, it irked her,” he laughs. “And that, to me, was the whole dynamic. I enjoyed irking her. Then she’d find ways to irk me. We were in those characters before we ever got to the set.”
On the set, Sweeney said his figure skating injuries were no joke. The scene where he has ziplock bags of ice on his hips? Not scripted.
Sweeney with his The Cutting Edge costar Moira Kelly in 1992.
(Ron Galella, Ltd. via Getty Images)
“My hips were really messed up,” he says. “In hockey pants, you have padding when you fall down. In figure skating, you have nothing. You hit that hip bone, and it takes a month or two to heal. But you land on it three days later and three days after that. Figure skaters are tough. I know it’s a fun sport to make fun of, but, man, when they wipe out, that ice is hard.”
Despite strong early audience reactions, MGM, the studio that produced the film, was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time of its release and lacked the budget to promote it. Instead, the movie became a word-of-mouth hit, eventually dominating VHS rentals and DVD sales.
The Cutting Edge went on to spawn, in his words, “all these bad sequels.” Notably, neither Sweeney nor Kelly appeared in them.
“We were like, ‘I won’t do a sequel without you,’” he says.
The original film had a roughly $17 million budget. When a sequel was discussed, it had a lower budget of about $7 million, and Sweeney and Kelly were offered $25,000 each.
“It was three years later, and ours was the No. 1 movie on VHS in Blockbuster everywhere,” he says. “They made it real easy for us to turn it down.”
Still, he has ideas for a modern revival.
Sweeney and Kelly during The Cutting Edge’s Olympic competition.
(Archive Photos via Getty Images)
“A Cobra Kai-type thing,” he says. “We’re married to other people and have kids. Maybe her kid is the rough-and-tumble one, and mine is the delicate one. Obviously, there’s still attraction. You could do 10 episodes off that pretty easy.”
The Cutting Edge made Sweeney a lifelong hockey fan. Until recently, Sweeney played once a week, but a torn rotator cuff — while playing the sport — has kept him off the ice for four months following surgery. He has two more months to go.
He’ll still be watching the Winter Olympics, though.
“I’m a huge hockey guy, so I will watch just to root for Canada to lose,” Sweeney says with a laugh. “I mean, you want America to win, but more importantly, you want Canada to lose.”
While he’s glad the NHL players are in the Olympics, he wishes Russian players could compete as well.
Sweeney has remained a hockey fan and still plays weekly, though he’s currently in recovery for two more months following surgery.
(Bill Smith via Getty Images)
“Alexander Ovechkin, Andrei Vasilevskiy — you could argue that the Russians would have the best team of all the countries right now from their star players in the NHL. I would love to see it, but we’re not going to,” he says.
He’ll also watch pairs figure skating. As far as his viewing habits outside the Olympics, we ask if he’s seen Heated Rivalry. While he’s heard about it — who hasn’t at this point? — he hasn’t yet seen it but “is looking forward to at some point.”
It’s not exactly like he’s been sitting around. He’s been shooting The Legend of Van Dorn in Tennessee. Funnily enough, there was a Cutting Edge reference on set.
“This guy pushes me in the scene, and I staggered back a little bit and lost my balance,” he says. “One of the crew members yelled, ‘Toe pick!’ It was great timing.”
Sweeney, with The Cutting Edge director Paul Michael Glaser, had never skated prior to the movie.
(©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Sweeney recently finished Red Ink, a 1949 newspaper drama shot in long, continuous takes. The movie is made up of six 11-minute takes.
“It’s like doing a play, but harder,” he says. “No edits. You might have seven people who have to hit exact marks.”
He also appears in a new action film opposite Milla Jovovich and is developing a western, his first since Lonesome Dove, that he’s written and plans to direct.
Reuniting with Francis Ford Coppola for 2024’s Megalopolis was especially meaningful.
Sweeney’s first leading role was in the famed director’s 1987 Gardens of Stone, which was overshadowed by the death of Coppola’s son Gian-Carlo, which occurred during production.
“There was a sadness about the whole thing,” he says. “I’d run into Francis over the years, and I could tell that when he looked at me, I reminded him of [that time]. I was the new guy on the movie when his son died. That was always there.”
So when he heard Coppola was making Megalopolis, “I reached out.” At his screen test, Sweeney brought a photo of himself with Coppola on the set of Gardens of Stone that he’s carried with him throughout his career. Coppola signed it and put the date: 2023.
Sweeney at the Toronto Film Festival premiere of Megalopolis with Adam Driver, Francis Ford Coppola, Nathalie Emmanuel and Giancarlo Esposito.
(Robert Okine via Getty Images)
“He said that was the most important part,” Sweeney says. “It was his way of saying, ‘Let’s make new memories. Let’s move on.’ … It was really great to be with him and try to support him in his dream.”
Asked how he defines success at this stage of his life, versus in the early days, he says isn’t about awards or paydays.
“I was never motivated by ‘I gotta go win an Oscar.’ They were paying me 10 times the money … [the $60,000] my dad [ever made working],” says the Long Island, N.Y., native. “It was all the money I needed. I was like: ‘This is unbelievable.’ I still like that when it happens.”
His adult children are the true measurement, though. He has a daughter who’s studying premed in college and a son who lives in Chicago.
“It’s a successful month to me if I get to spend a couple of days with both of them,” he says.
More than three decades after The Cutting Edge, he’s glad it still holds a special place for viewers — and he has a theory why.
“I’ve kept my nose clean,” Sweeney says. “I’ve done this for 40 years, and I don’t have any skeletons. It’s easier for people not to have conflicted feelings.”
