"Acting is kind of gay," Jackson said. "It makes you soft.



Rampage Jackson as BA in A Team 
 Talk about a Bad Attitude.

As early December darkness fell on the Vancouver set of Fox's $100-million movie reboot of "The A-Team," one of its stars, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, found himself fending off an all-too-familiar impulse. The urge to, well, rampage.

Rampage Jackson weighs inPride of the Ultimate Fighting Championshipand a former light-heavyweight champ (he isscheduled to fight May 29 for the title in Las Vegas) — a guy whose day job consists of beating the toughest men in the world into either submission or unconsciousness — Jackson stood in the middle of his trailer spewing invective with a glint of real menace in his eye.
At issue: a movie crew member had wandered in on this final day of principal photography and — whether jokingly or not — called the muscle-bound movie star a homophobic epithet. Jackson had responded with barely contained fury. He threw the guy out, shouting him down with every conceivable gay slur. "You're a punk!" Jackson finally bellowed.

He claimed the crew member's intent had been to provoke a physical assault. "That … wanted me to punch him so he could sue me," the professional body-slammer explained, using a certain 12-letter curse word that he lets fly often in conversation — a word that has no business appearing in a family newspaper and, for the sake of this article, will from here on out be substituted with "individual."

But the outburst seemed to also prompt Jackson, 31, to wrestle with other issues: his experiences in Western Canada, his choice to take time out of the octagon (as the UFC's fighting ring is known) and how his stardom in "The A-Team," Fox studios' tent-pole adaptation of the '80s action-comedy series that's due in theaters June 11, might affect his fighting career.

"Acting is kind of gay," Jackson said. "It makes you soft. You got all these people combing your hair and putting a coat over your shoulders when you're cold. I don't want a coat over my shoulders! I'm a tough-ass [individual]!"
A-Team running

"Vancouver strikes me as a San Francisco-kind of place," he continued. "And I don't want [individuals] getting ideas about me. I feel in my heart I'm the toughest [individual] on the planet. And I don't want nothing changing my train of thought. If you don't believe that when we step inside the octagon, it shows."

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