Why Tulsa King star Sylvester Stallone is ‘constantly’ overdosing on humble pie
Action star Sylvester Stallone earned his success – but says it took him a while to lose his ‘youthful arrogance’ and learn how to deal with it.
Sylvester Stallone was at home doodling when Taylor Sheridan called him at 10 o’clock at night. The writer, director and producer behind acclaimed series Yellowstone, 1883, Mayor of Kingstown, and films Sicario and Hell or High Water, had an idea.
They had last seen each other when Sheridan was cleaning stalls at the Los Angeles Equestrian Centre. His career had since skyrocketed and his-big budget shows attracted stars such as Kevin Costner, Jeremy Renner, Sam Elliott. He would soon cast Harrison Ford in 1923.
“Hey, how you doing Sly?” he said. “I got this idea. What do you think about a fish out of water?” Stallone was all ears. “You’re a gangster that gets banished to Tulsa.” Stallone replied, “Where the f..k is Tulsa?” Sheridan explained it was “in the middle of nowhere” which was the basis for a series. “Stranger in a strange land.” Stallone’s response? “I’m in.”
Welcome to Tulsa King, now in its third season with a fourth commissioned. Stallone portrays Dwight “The General” Manfredi, fresh out of jail after 25 years and exiled by the New York mafia to Oklahoma. As his new empire grows, challenging and threatening others, trouble comes from all directions.
In an interview with Review, Stallone, 79, the iconic actor and writer who helmed the Rocky and Rambo franchises, explains he was attracted to the idea of leading his first series because of the depth of characters and story, and to explore these over more than two hours.
“It’s genre I’ve never been in, but I think it’s interesting to take all the things I’ve learned from being in very big films and try to shrink it down,” he explains via Zoom. “And it’s a different kind of acting. A lot of theatrical actors or film actors, they tend to be a little bit more relaxed and flowing on the smaller screen. That’s why you’re seeing such good acting lately from a variety of actors because they’ve done it big time. Now this is like big time on a smaller screen.”
Stallone hit the big time when he wrote and starred in Rocky (1976). The story of how that film was made is as legendary as the film itself. Stallone, stereotyped as a tough guy, had only secured small acting parts. He knew there was more to his talents.
So, he taught himself how to write a screenplay. He disconnected the phone. He blackened the windows in his apartment. And he wrote Rocky, about a boxer, but it was also a story of redemption and validation, love and friendship, a journey of discovery and determination.
“There’s a certain kind of pattern or mentality that you must maintain which is like there is no other option,” he says of writing Rocky. “I never went out to a bar. I never went to a dance. I never had a date. I mean, nothing.”
He had had a role alongside Henry Winkler in The Lords of Flatbush (1974) as the tough but likeable Stanley Rosiello. It gave him the idea for a winning formula: a thug with a softer side. He channelled this into Rocky.
The studios loved the script but wanted to cast another actor. Stallone was offered about $US300,000 ($455,000) not to star in his own film. It was a turning point. If he surrendered the part, he knew he would never make it as an actor.
Rocky became a huge hit. It earned Stallone an Academy Award nomination for screenwriting and acting. He would write, he thinks, about 40 scripts over the coming decades. He returned to the role again and again in sequels and a reboot, and earned another Academy Award nomination for acting in Creed (2015).
Born in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, in July 1946, to an astrologer mother and hairdresser father, he describes his early life as “rough”. His distinctive snarled mouth and slurred speech was due to nerves being damaged when born which partly paralysed his face. Stallone’s upbringing was unsettled and he lived in foster care as a boy. His parents divorced before he was a teenager. He was schooled in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Florida. He had an explosive personality and was an outsider and loner. At school, teachers humiliated him by putting a dunce’s cap on his head. He returned to New York in 1969 with no prospects, but with ambition and determination. He cleaned lion cages at Central Park Zoo for a while, earning $US1 per hour. He studied drama, started in theatre but scored only small film roles. He saw movies as an escape and dreamt of being the hero.
“I don’t know anybody,” he recalls of those days. “I don’t have any money. I started sleeping in alleys and doorways at bus stations and having police tap you on the feet to get moving. But what I learned, when you’re at that lower echelon, is how to be empathetic to the poor people of the world that are never going to get a break, like the Rocky mentality. I also had tremendous pride about not wanting to be just a nobody who was living hand-to-mouth. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. I just knew there’s something more if you keep pushing and keep stepping in the right direction.”
The success of Rocky, he concedes, went to his head. He had been counted out for so long with people telling him he would never make it and critics writing that he could not act that when he did make it, he drew the wrong lesson.
“I didn’t do it very well,” Stallone says of sudden fame. “I didn’t know anything. It just was an overcompensation of having lived under poverty’s foot for so long and now you can actually afford to pay the bill. So there was a bit of arrogance that I paid the price for.”
His next films, F.I.S.T (1978) and Paradise Alley (1978), made critics question whether he was a star. He returned to Rocky with sequels (1979, 1982) to prove them wrong, and more later. Then, in 1982, came First Blood, the story of a Vietnam veteran who returns home with demons and finds himself unfairly on the wrong side of law enforcement.
The character of John Rambo had a strong cultural resonance and spawned several sequels. Based on a book, Stallone saw the potential but changed the ending so that the character was not killed by his own team leader. He talked to veterans and immersed himself in the role. “They didn’t beg to go (to Vietnam),” he says. “We asked them to go. They did the job. And America didn’t like the outcome. So, they paid the price. They had to carry this cross on their back their whole life.” The movie gained a cult following.
By the 1980s and into the 90s, Stallone was a certified action star defined by his physicality as much as his intense acting. He recalls the rivalry with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the only other action hero in the same league. “We were at each other’s throats for sure,” he says. “Eventually we grew up and he ran for politics and I endorsed him, and here we are friends.”
In 2010, Stallone stepped into the director’s chair for The Expendables, uniting the stars of the action-man genre, including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis and Schwarzenegger. “A lot of tough guys,” he notes. “You had to be careful you didn’t open your mouth to the wrong guy.” Sequels roped in Ford, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude van Damme.
Playing a mafia boss is not something Stallone had done before Tulsa King. He excels in the role, bringing gravitas and style to the screen. It is the most streamed series on Paramount+ and was in the top 10 of all subscription video-on-demand series in late 2024. That is, 159 million views of season two. Stallone says the writing is what makes a great series or a movie, and the opportunity to portray The General appealed to him. He has written several episodes of the series which enabled him to shape not only the story but also the character.
“I really wanted to try an experiment with Rocky. It’s a whole other thing. You’re walking around. ‘How you doing?’ And then Rambo doesn’t speak at all. So he’s very sequestered inside. He’s very private. Gangsters have been played in a variety of incarnations but no one has that humour. You think he’s lighthearted, he’s all embracing, but when the other bad guy shows up, then you realise, ‘Oh, this guy has a screw loose, too’. So, you keep the audience immersed in his different kind of pattern.”
The new season sees Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Patrick and Kevin Pollak join an already stacked cast that includes Dana Delany. Stallone says his character is “in dire dire straits” and how he survives and thrives is what it is about.
In recent years, we have seen a new side of Stallone. He filmed a reality series, The Family Stallone (2023), with his wife Jennifer Flavin and daughters Sophia, Sistine and Scarlet. He works alongside Scarlet in Tulsa King, which presents challenges. “Can you imagine?” he says. “She has a job to do and she has to do it on her own. And even though you want to protect her, you realise you were the same age and no one protected you. You got to let them fall and rise and go forward on their own.”
Those life lessons are never far from mind these days. Stallone is working on a memoir. He acknowledges that Rocky changed the trajectory of his life. He earned that success but it took a while for him to learn how to deal with it. “In one year, I went from hell to heaven. I thought I knew everything. And then I found out a few films later on, ‘No, you’re just starting, pal. You’re just starting.’ So, I look at that old manifestation of a kind of youthful arrogance and now I’m just constantly overdosing on humble pie.”
Season three of Tulsa King is streaming on Paramount+.