‘I regret being an absent father — and doing my own stunts’
Sylvester Stallone is still an action man at 76 in his new show, Tulsa King. He tells Stephen Armstrong about beating drugs, reconciling with his wife and making up with his daughters.
Action movies “changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on”, Sylvester Stallone, star of Rocky and Rambo, says with a sigh, pointing out the sites of his five back operations, neck fusion and repaired shoulders.
“Don’t do your own stunts, that’s the moral of that. But the special effects became more important than the person. Life is a matter of managing your ass-whipping.
“That’s why I’ve always been a fan of defeated fighters,” he continues. “The undefeated boxer? I’m not interested.”
Stallone still works out. He may be 76, but underneath his spotless white shirt, his muscles move around like someone is trying to park a couple of cars beneath his shoulders. And he’s a charmer. “Can you tell them to be quiet in the hall?” he calls out.
And then he turns, grins broadly and says: “Ask me anything.”
We’re here to discuss Tulsa King, his proper TV debut. He’s starring and producing, and it’s tempting to see an awful lot of his life in the character.
Stallone plays Dwight “the General” Manfredi, a mafioso who has served 25 years for a murder his boss committed and comes out expecting a fair reward for his omerta. What he finds is a world that’s changed: a wife who has divorced him, a daughter who’s not speaking to him and a gang run by millennials who don’t do things the old way.
They want him gone, so they offer him control of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has to go and build an operation and send them $5000 a week minimum or he sleeps with the fishes.
There’s rich comedy, including his dealings with legalised marijuana, his attempts to build a gang with stoners and Uber drivers, and a heartbreaking one-night stand with a 40-something woman who mistakes him for a younger man and storms out, revolted, when she finds out he’s in his 70s. “Everyone has been in that position,” Stallone says wryly. “I’ve been there. You can be a mafioso or a movie star and still be left behind in your pyjamas feeling bummed out about being dumped.”
As if to prove his point, Stallone has just emerged from the shortest celebrity split in history. The entrepreneur and model Jennifer Flavin, 54, his wife and mother of his three daughters, left him in August and returned in September. The couple went from filing for divorce to an order of abatement at a pace that feels like the average UK prime minister’s career.
“Let’s just say that it was a very tumultuous time,” he says carefully. “There was a reawakening of what was more valuable than anything, which is my love for my family. It takes precedence over my work and that was a hard lesson to learn.”
Just as Dwight in Tulsa King tries to patch things up with his kid, Stallone regrets being an absent father. “I didn’t pay enough attention when they were growing up,” he says. “I was so career-oriented and now I go, ‘Okay, I don’t have that much runway up ahead and I want to start asking them about their lives’.”
Stallone’s sons are from his first marriage to the actress Sasha Czack. His elder son, Sage, died of a heart attack, aged 36, in 2012, and he shelters his younger autistic son, Seargeoh, from nosy journalistic queries. With his daughters, Sophia, Sistine and Scarlet, aged 26, 24 and
20, however, he’s making up for lost time. “I ask them about their day and they started at first a little monosyllabic,” he admits. “Then I heard one say, ‘I was just thinking about you.’ Oh my God. I’ve never heard that before in my life. When a daughter knows you care, she’s there for ever.”
Stallone didn’t have a good relationship with his father, Frank, growing up in New York and then Washington. Frank was a
World War II veteran who became a barber and failed actor, and who took his frustrations out on his family. “I was raised by Rambo,” Stallone says. “I had a very tumultuous upbringing, and I could have gone two ways. I could have gone feral — a really bad, self-abusive drug addict — but I went the other way. I developed a sarcastic sense of humour. ‘Okay, I got the worst father in the world. Hooray for me. Thank you, Dad. Appreciate it. It was tough coming up, but you allowed me to play a character that I think was pretty well-rounded.’”
Both the boxer Rocky Balboa and the army veteran John Rambo were created and co-created respectively by the actor out of frustration.
After years of rejection, he wrote Rocky in three and half days but struggled to sell it because he insisted on playing the star.
Then, when Rocky became a hit in
1976, he was pigeonholed. The role of Rambo, in First Blood, was turned down by Robert de Niro, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman, among others, before it reached him. Sly took the script and rewrote it, channelling his father into the part along with the anger he felt at being the constant outsider. “I always saw Rambo as a modern incarnation of the Frankenstein monster,” he explains. “We built him, he escapes, he wants to be part of society again but he reminds us of our defeat in Vietnam, so he has to be pushed out — and killed if necessary. We hate him for our failure.”
When Rocky was released — a white boxer fighting a black champion and wrapping himself in the Stars and Stripes — it clashed with the radical Hollywood of 1976.
“I didn’t even know what a Republican or a Democrat was until I was 30 years old,” he says earnestly. “I really didn’t until I went to Hollywood. I didn’t know wrapping myself in a flag in Rocky would throw down the gauntlet.”
Stallone was embraced by the Republican Party despite supporting the occasional Democrat and having an ambivalent attitude towards gun ownership. “I don’t see a purpose in hunting with a 40-round magazine,” he shrugs. “If you can’t hit something in five shots, then you’re not a very good hunter. To be able to buy a weapon that I can change in one second to automatic? I don’t see it.
“You can’t take guns away, they’ve been ingrained for 250 years, but you have to take the irresponsibility out of it.”
He is interested in showing the vulnerable side of characters and there is plenty of this in Tulsa King. Stallone plays the wise but weary killer with a precise stillness, his eyes taking us through his hope and despair. There’s little violence — and even that comes with delayed punchlines, such as his takeover of a marijuana store, which he returns to with a CCTV camera, saying: “Yes, I’m aware of the irony.”
Above all, he plays a lonely man, and it’s surprising to find this strikes a chord with him. “I’ve always had a sense of isolation,” he says. “I’m not a gregarious person. I could spend three, four, five days a week alone in my house, no problem. A lot of people avoid hanging out with themselves. Everything is misdirection, distraction, restaurants, and clubs. That’s fine for them. But it’s not for me.”
In the end, he explains, Dwight’s choice is to take responsibility for his life — something Stallone says he has tried to do, but sometimes needs a correction because it’s hard. In 2007 he was caught at customs in Sydney with a human growth hormone and later pleaded guilty to possessing the banned substance.
Again he returns to the idea of fighting addiction as the crucial choice he made. “I decided to be the architect of my own life a long time ago,” he says softly. “Drug addiction, I think, is founded on one thing — the inability to deal with freedom of choice. It’s very tough to live a life because you have to deal with your decisions. Addicts have one thing to deal with. Everything becomes really simple. You get the next fix.
“You don’t deal with paying your taxes, a job, a marriage or raising a child, and these are hard to get right.”
He smiles the smile of a man who faced the single life but then returned home. “Do you know what I mean? Freedom’s a bitch.”
The Times of London
Tulsa King is streaming on TVNZ+ ● from tomorrow.