Sylvester Stallone says ‘Tulsa King’ echoes his own Hollywood comeback

See more Toronto Sun on Google — save as a Preferred Source

Sylvester Stallone knows what it feels like to be exiled.

The Tulsa King star says he can relate to the character of Dwight “The General” Manfredi, the mobster exiled to Oklahoma after 25 years behind bars, because he’s experienced his own periods of professional limbo.

“I have been in limbo,” Stallone tells Postmedia in a recent interview. “I know what it’s like to be ostracized, and perhaps a lot of it was your fault, but the point is, you’re gone. You are literally being banished.”

After a slew of box-office misfires in the early 2000s, Stallone, now 80, remembers how Hollywood was pushing him toward the exit.

He found his footing again by reviving his titular boxing hero for 2006’s Rocky Balboa.

“I said, ‘I gotta do something. What do I do?’ ” he recalls after Get Carter and Driven flopped back-to-back in 2000 and 2001. “So I use my head. And I used that character of Rocky, who’s always come to my rescue, and wrote Rocky Balboa. And now we’re back again.”

Dreams do come true, but these dreams are drowning in sweat.

Dwight, whom Stallone has played for four seasons on the Taylor Sheridan-created series, displays the same resilience.

“He also has these kind of peaks and valleys, and he always does something that kind of brings him back to the forefront again,” Stallone says. “Whereas a lot of people would just lay down and say, ‘Okay, I’m done, I’m retired, I’m just gonna open a little bar.’ No, he’s a different animal.”

In Season 4, which premiered this week, Dwight is pulled deeper into the street instincts he swore he’d left behind in New York as he battles other families in the Midwest and the main mob crew back in NYC.

“In this season, Dwight’s facing problems on three fronts. There’s the local henchmen. Then you have the AI threat, which is a really big one. Because it has unlimited money. Then you have the East Coast mafia cloud looming over me, wanting to take what I have,” he says.

Dwight’s story will continue to evolve with Season 5 already being greenlit to shoot in New York City later this year.

“There’s something about his warrior mentality, even though he thinks he’s not, he is,” Stallone says. “And he cannot get rid of his spots. Which he’ll prove, eventually, in this season and the next season, like, ‘Why can’t I find peace? What is it? Do I function better with no peace?’ … Dwight, he’s out there, he has it perfect in Tulsa. But of course, he’s like a magnet for problems.”

‘Streaming allows an actor to really spread his wings’

Stallone’s transition to the small screen comes at a time as more actors sign on to streaming projects.

Once one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office stars, he thinks streamers have become bigger risk takers than most movie studios.

“The people that ran studios, studio heads back in the ’70s, were not techies. They were not mathematical geniuses. They were businessmen, but they had a kind of a gut, a gambler mentality,” he says. “That’s the key. Because Hollywood is built on gambling. This is gambling. It’s like, every movie’s a crapshoot. It’s a $100 million roll of the dice one time. But those guys are gone.”

Nowadays, a movie’s success is determined, he says, by “computers and the publicity department.”

“You couldn’t make The Godfather today. You couldn’t make Rocky today, because those actors don’t exist,” he says. “Back then, the people that ran studios just made a movie. They literally flew by the seat of their pants.”

Today’s movies are hampered by “rules” and guided by fears about how a film will do opening weekend. How hot an actor is also comes into play, he says.

“Streaming allows an actor to really spread his wings, so I think the best writing and the best acting, the most ambitious projects are for sure, on streaming,” he says. “And unfortunately … well, maybe fortunately, that’s the way it’s gonna be. I just don’t see it turning around. I just don’t.”

Stallone reacts to biopic

In addition to Tulsa King, Stallone is preparing to see his life’s story retold on the big screen in the upcoming biopic I Play Rocky.

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, where it was the runner-up for the People’s Choice Prize.

Directed by Peter Farrelly, the film casts Anthony Ippolito as a young version of Stallone and follows the making of 1976’s Rocky.

Stallone wrote Rocky for himself because he “wasn’t making it as an actor” and was destined for a life as an extra.

He screened I Play Rocky in private and said he was “stunned” after watching Ippolito’s ability to tell his story.

“I didn’t think it was that important. I really … I thought, okay, this is my journey, end of it, and I made Rocky,” he says. “I had no idea that someone like Peter Farrelly thought this is more interesting than the Rocky movie, because this is real, and that was fantasy.”

But he’s thankful his odyssey, which saw him refuse to give up his dream of playing the title character in the film he wrote, is getting the big screen treatment.

“People are going to see the journey that basically no one has ever seen before,” he says.

How Stallone went from homeless to Hollywood

To coincide with I Play Rocky and a new season of Tulsa King, Stallone has also released his first memoir, recounting his early struggles before Rocky turned him into a household name.

The Steps, which is in stores now, starts in 1969 when he landed in New York with $80 in his pocket.

“I didn’t know where I was going to sleep. I was lonely, scared. Then a couple of years later, fame happens,” he says.

The book details how studio heads wanted to make Rocky without him after he completed the script.

He was eventually offered $360,000 to walk away from the movie and forfeit his dream of starring in a leading role.

“This was my only chance. I was never going to get a good part,” he says now, looking back.

After completing work on the book, Stallone calls himself “one lucky bastard.”

He hopes The Steps provides some inspiration for his younger fans about having dreams and not giving up on them.

“You know, when you’re young, you don’t think about your actual fear and the facts of failure,” Stallone says. “When you’re young, and maybe naive, you’re full of a certain kind of creativity that’s just overflowing.”

As you get older, he says, “life ebbs that away.”

Writing the book was “like opening the door of a haunted house.”

“I started digging back into my memories, and I went, ‘Oh my God. I could have never accomplished this today, not even close,’ ” he says.

He’d like to think his story might be “a nice shot in the arm” to show readers how he made the impossible happen. But his success comes with a cautionary note.

“Here I am, 50 years later, still talking about it,” he says, smiling. “So dreams do come true, but these dreams are drowning in sweat.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com

1. 

   Toronto & GTA
2. 

   Soccer
3. 

   Editorial Cartoons
4. 

   Sunshine Girls
5. 

   Canada