In this January 7, 1993 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Jean-Claude Van Damme sits down fresh off Universal Soldier and eight days from the release of Nowhere to Run. He is 32 years old and he is at the very top — the exact position the whole industry was arranging itself around, and the one he spends most of the conversation quietly describing the cost of.
Petty asks him whether fame is everything he expected. He does not sell it. He talks about promotion, about travelling, about never being in the same place twice, about being too much away from his family because he is pushing so hard. It is a strikingly unguarded answer for a press stop eight days ahead of a release, and it is the part of the interview that has aged into something else entirely. Van Damme has since said that the years from 1993 to 1996 are what broke him, and that the pressure of nonstop filming and promotion is what pushed him into a cocaine addiction that nearly killed him. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1998. This tape is January 7, 1993. He is standing at the door of all of it, describing it out loud, and he has no idea.
The rest covers the machinery of how he got there: fifteen years of ballet, weightlifting and martial arts, the Universal Soldier audience he worried he might lose, and Petty’s direct question about whether he enjoys being a sex symbol. Near the end he says he is finished for a while — three movies back to back, and then a year off to rest. Hard Target opened that August. Timecop, Street Fighter and Sudden Death followed. The rest never came.
Fans know the confession; they have heard it from the broken man in JCVD (2008). This is the same story told by the man at the peak, before he had any reason to tell it. Unseen since its original 1993 CTV broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.
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