Jean-Claude Van Damme: 'I tried to play the system; I was blacklisted'

Where is Jean-Claude Van Damme? We were supposed to meet in London, until he cancelled his trip at the last minute. Then I was to visit him on a film set in Budapest, but that fell through when he wrapped his scenes early, and so he invited me instead to his parents' home in Belgium, only to go missing in action for 24 hours in the middle of negotiations. None of this is too surprising; after all, this is the self-sabotaging prima donna action star who rose in the 80s and ignominiously nose-dived in the 90s, having burned all his bridges in Hollywood.

And then, as I'm beginning to give up hope, he calls. "I just finished two movies back-to-back," he says apologetically. "When you finish a film, if you believed in your character, you're empty."

Van Damme is calling to talk about his role in The Expendables 2 – basically the Avengers of late-20th century action heroes. He's the lead villain, and it's the first major film he's appeared in for over a decade, his personal life and career having hit the skids some 15 years ago.

When he broke out in 1988 in Bloodsport, Van Damme was 27, an action star with the muscles as well as the karate skills. He was desperately eager to please, enthusiasm bursting from his pores as he bounced around the talk show circuit, doing the splits for paparazzi outside LA nightclubs. Bigger success saw that enthusiasm turn to arrogance; by the late 90s he'd been married five times and had a coke habit that almost took him out completely.

Today, though, older and humbled, he turns out to be a joy to talk to. He's extremely grateful to Sylvester Stallone, his boyhood hero, for casting him – despite having turned down a role in the first Expendables in 2010. "When he called me, I was editing my movie, The Eagle Path," Van Damme explains. "I said, 'I cannot do it!' And he said, 'Excuse me!?' But I had that fever. If the King of Thailand is calling me, no, I stay in my room – cutting, cutting, cutting …" Stallone reportedly said that Van Damme refused the role because he didn't want to lose a fight to Jet Li, although this suggestion is vigorously denied ("Bullshit!"). He admits, however, that if he's playing a good guy he doesn't like to lose fights.

Still, as the villain in this one, he was very happy to lose the fight, and it was his own suggestion that he and Stallone slug it out with no weapons, just mano-a-mano. "The fans, they want to see Muhammad Ali against Frasier," he says. "Hand to hand combat. So I said to Stallone, 'We're two gladiators! I have to kick the shit out of you, and then you kick the shit out of me.' And I think people will love it."

Van Damme first went to America to become an actor in 1981, after achieving professional success in karate and bodybuilding. He spoke little English, and spent years working menial jobs and performing karate kicks in front of anybody connected with the film industry. He finally landed the lead in Bloodsport, which racked up a substantial profit and made him a star. A slew of low-budget fight films followed before he scored bigger mainstream roles in Universal Soldier and Hard Target. For 1994's abysmal videogame adaptation Street Fighter, he was paid $7m. The film was critically pounded, but it did good business – and he got to have a fling with co-star Kylie Minogue.

He bristles when I bring it up. "Oh ... who said that to you?" he asks, clearly forgetting the interview a few years back in which he brought it up himself. "I tell you what, you should ask her," he says, shirking it. "She'll have a better memory. I'm 51 years old, do you know how much I was punched in the face on The Expendables? No, no. No. And let's just say it happened, so what? Who wants to know?"

I tell him I just want to verify before printing. "Sometimes you let go of stuff ... I don't know, maybe." He sighs, then becomes reflective. It's rather touching. "Yes. OK. Yes, yes, yes. It happened. I was in Thailand, we had an affair. Sweet kiss, beautiful lovemaking. It would be abnormal not to have had an affair, she's so beautiful and she was there in front of me every day with a beautiful smile, simpatico, so charming, she wasn't acting like a big star. I knew Thailand very well, so I showed her my Thailand. She's a great lady."

The same year saw Van Damme's biggest box-office success, Timecop, which made $100m in the US. Now he was truly a star. And that's when things started to fall apart. Universal called, offering him $12m a film for a three-film deal. He demanded $20m. "Like Jim Carrey."

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He laughs at his own arrogance. "I was fucked up, man. But you know, it was not about the money. The people in the UK will read this and say, 'What a fucking piglet.' Sorry about my expression! I was making movie after movie, and in between movies I was doing promotion. I was tired. Everything I was touching was making money. Jim Carrey was being paid a fortune. And I wanted to play with the system. Like an idiot. Ridiculous." They hung up on him. "I was on the blacklist. That was it."

Ten grams of cocaine a day will do that to you. He was partying hard: crashing cars into nightclubs, fighting with paparazzi, getting arrested for drink-driving. His films got worse and worse and made less and less. He starred in Double Team, which climaxes in Rome's Colosseum, filled with explosives by Mickey Rourke, who sends a tiger to eat Van Damme's baby.

A near suicidal Van Damme was diagnosed as bipolar. Rehab didn't work for him, so he went cold turkey and sweated it out in the gym, remarried his third wife (after a disastrous marriage with a fourth), and it's been happy families ever since.

It's been a long climb back up. He's spent the past 13 years acting in formulaic, often straight-to-DVD action movies, several for loyal Hong Kong action director Ringo Lam. The notable exception has been 2008's JCVD, a claustrophobic heist thriller in which he plays himself to startling effect. So raw is he in the film, which culminates in a searingly honest confessional to camera about the mistakes he's made in his life, that he was ashamed when he first watched it. Time magazine rated it the second best performance of the year and said he deserved an Oscar. Van Damme has claimed in the past that his acting's often been as bad as his films, but JCVD was a revelation. "I'm trying to be a better actor," he says. "It's sad, I would love to be directed by people like Tony and Ridley Scott, Scorsese, all those guys, that would be my dream."

Maybe, I suggest, good scripts will come now he's back in a big film again. He sounds hopeful but not overly optimistic. "Yeah, I guess, that's the business. It's all about business and money and the value of the actor. Up and down. Maybe. Who knows?"

JCVD could have created better opportunities for him if he'd only plugged it in the US. Major promotional appearances had been booked, but he cancelled his trip to stay in Thailand and look after one of his sick dogs, enraging many a cinema owner and media person. However, hearing his side of the story today, I sympathise.

"Yes," he says, "it's true. Scarface. Who you'd like by the way. He's next to me here. I adopted a few dogs in Thailand, and he was one of them. Another dog was attacking him. He was full of scars, I don't know if they used him for fighting, so I called him Scarface. So I've got all this promotion, I've got [morning TV show] The View booked, the New York Times … They say, 'If you go there, the movie will do well.' But my dog is sick, he had a stroke. Brain stroke. So, clinically, he's dead.

"I go to the clinic and he's got tubes and everything. I love animals. I talk in his ear and I kiss him, and guess what? The fucker wakes up! We have to get him in a cage, so I get the biggest one, and I sleep there with him. What, I'm gonna promote JCVD? Who's JCVD? He's the guy we saw in the movie. Why change him in real life? So, Scarface was alive next to me. He had a tube in his penis, I had to change it. And now he's an amazing dog. He loves me like crazy. And JCVD's gone, but Scarface is here. And God paid me back with Expendables 2. Voilà."

This episode speaks volumes. As desperate as Van Damme is for acclaim and success, he has his priorities. He views The Expendables as a blessing, and things look good. With JCVD he proved he has acting chops as well as karate chops, and next year he's the lead in a comedy, Welcome To The Jungle, alongside Flight Of The Conchords' Kristen Schaal.

"He's had his ups and downs," Stallone said recently, "but I believe once you've had that star, it's just a matter of re-igniting it."

I ask Van Damme how he feels about this.

"You know what? I'm scared," he says. "It's one shot, this film, and hopefully the studios … Ringo Lam once told me they just like new faces – fresh fish. But maybe they would like an old fish."

The Expendables 2 is released on Thursday