All time favorite Hollywood stars like Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, and Wesley Snipes are only a few of the big names featured in The Expendables 3. If you’ve seen the ads you know you’re in for a real treat. With three films and talks about a fourth one being on the works, it seems The Expendables will be around for while.

We spoke with the legendary action stars and the newcomers about their new action packed film, one they all seem to agree was a hell of a good time.

“It was great working with these guys because I know what they’re going through. You know, Kellan’s got a little more experience but the rest of them are fairly new and so you’re sensitive to that and I can feel their enthusiasm and nervousness. Ronda, I wanted Ronda from Jumpstreet. I knew she was gonna be a star. I just knew it, you know she just has it and her nervousness worked for her because she’s so good you’d never know she was nervous… The rest of the guys, these are all one-of-a-kind. We’re not coming this way again. To find a guy like Terry and Randy Couture, I mean world champions. You have seriously, you have a real bouillabaisse of talent here. And it’s great to be in the kitchen mixing it up,” said Stallone. 

Stallone, who plays Barney Ross is given a new assignment to stop a ‘powerful weapon from falling into the wrong hands’. Barney and his team go find Doctor Death, a new addition to the crew. Wesley Snipes talked about this character. “It was a great opportunity to work with some of the actors that I’ve always admired… Also the chance to act a little crazy in this. My character Doc is a medic, but he’s been away for about eight years. He was quite lonely… so he comes out cuckoo.” But things for the team go a little wrong so Ross decides to let go of the old and bring in the new. He wanted to make sure his former partner Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson) goes away for good this time. Gibson shares his thoughts on his character after reading the script. “Wow. It was very involved. There was a lot of characters, and I didn’t know how they were going to jam it all in. But somehow they managed to do it. And everybody got a fair shake, and there’s a lot of people here. And, you know, so hats off to Sly for sort of enabling that to happen. When I read it, you know I thought, I didn’t read it as I was the bad guy. In fact, I didn’t even know I was the bad guy until I saw it last night.”

Since taking down Conrad Stonebanks seems to be a job that requires both the classics and the new, adding a female seemed to be the right thing to do. Ronda Rousey, who plays Luna, talked to us about joining The Expendables. “It’s definitely a very different environment that I thought… I don’t know what I was expecting. I was expecting the worst. And yeah, I felt like a little like the Downy Teddy bear when I actually showed up. Everybody was just so welcoming and warm. So yeah, everyone, really, I felt went out of their way to make me feel comfortable, and so I couldn’t have asked for a better first project to be on.”

The cast has an active lifestyle and share stories on working with stunt coordinator Brad Martin and fight choreographer J.J. Perry. “We all love shooting guns, and we all love learning new techniques. For myself, I’m a motocross, where every time, every new action movie, I get to learn some new trick. Working with them, and to add Dan Bradley who’s the master of second unit and stunt choreography and just compiling both of them together, I think what you have with the first one was the gem of all the action. You had a lot of blood and guts. Second one, you had the humor… With this third one, you have a great layering of the action with the comedy, and then with all the stunts, I mean… So it gets bigger and louder. We definitely had a lot of fun doing this one,” shared Kellan Lutz (Smilee).

Among these megastars is also Kelsey Grammer (Bonaparte). He confesses he’s always wanted to work with Sylvester Stallone. “I always wanted to work with Sly. I actually kinda went after this for a while… I had the best time with him and it was a revelation for me in terms just how smart and how improvisatorial Sly could be as well. And generous with his time and generous with his acting, except when he changed the camera angle a little to make me look short.” We also get to see Jet Li bring his character Yin Yang to the screen. Stallone assures that there will be more Asian stars in the future of The Expendables. “Absolutely, there will be [more Asian stars]. Jackie was on but literally it became a scheduling problem... Jackie’s [Jackie Chan] just, he’s so busy in his regular life. He has so many businesses and he’s so loved over in China, in such demand that he literally couldn’t… We’ll get him next time.”

Meanwhile experience the action and humor that Expendables, like Glen Powell (Thorn) and Victor Ortiz (Mars) combined with icons like Harrison Ford (Drummer), Dolph Lundgren (Gunnar Jensen), Arnold Schwarzenegger and Antonio Banderas (Galgo), have to bring. The Expendables 3 is just as action packed, as it is star packed.

Stallone added that the violence in this film is exaggerated and to do the expendable, you pretty much have to be an expendable. “Ours [the movie] is so over the top that it isn’t something that you would expect people to repeat…. We just try to make it so it looks as though it’s a fantasy. It isn’t real. Some movies can get so real. Then you can say ‘oh I can do that.’ There’s not a lot of people that could do what the expendables can do. “

The Expendables 3 is in theaters Friday, August 15^th.