I give you a challenge: picture Sylvester Stallone “nervous” and tell me what that image in your head looks like. I know, hard task to complete, right? But believe it or not, Sylvester Stallone does know what it’s like to be “nervous.”
In fact, he felt this way the moment he learned he would be starring opposite this fellow iconic actor.
Sylvester Stallone Reveals He Thought Starring Beside Samuel L. Jackson Would Be A Battle
Sylvester Stallone had a sort of visceral reaction to hearing the news that Samuel L. Jackson has been confirmed to join the ‘Tulsa King’ family.
This is regardless of the fact that the pair has been neighbors for 30 years prior to the ‘Avengers’ actor joining the series.
Stallone, 79, has been a part of Paramount+’s ‘Tulsa King’ hit series from the get go, but welcoming Jackson, 76, ahead of its third season felt like a whole moment.
“When I heard that was gonna happen, I went, ‘Oh, this is gonna be a fist fight. This is gonna be a battle,’” the Rocky actor told PEOPLE in a recent interview. “Like two boxers in a ring, and who is gonna throw the first punch? So you’re getting nervous because you’re dealing with serious competition.”
The raised hopes was somewhat dampened when Stallone, who plays the series lead mafia capo Dwight “The General” Manfredi, discovered that Jackson, who plays ex-con Russell Lee Washington Jr., will be starring as a friend and not a foe. Who could have seen that coming?
Regardless, the superstar actors’ working relationship was immediately comparable to the Fox and the Hounds’, as opposed to the clash of Tom and Jerry’s.
“Once he walks in, he goes, ‘Hey, dude brother,’ and I went, ‘Oh, here it goes.’ But now we’re good. Now we’re flowing,” Stallone says. “We could do a show called Tulsa King and Buddy. We just worked that well together.”
“We lived about a hundred yards away from each other for almost 30 years,” he shares. “Yet we didn’t— you know, we’re always working. So we never really saw each other, except at Planet Hollywood-type things or openings.”
Sylvester Stallone Reflects On His And Samuel L. Jackson’s Storied Hollywood Career
Whilst he noted that Jackson’s career path is so widely different from his, he did admit that, at one point, they both had something crucial in common.
“I guess he got to the point that I did that he’s done pretty much everything,” Stallone says. “But at this age in life, you want to be a little bit more grounded, steady, have your own show so you develop this thing, really flesh it out instead of working someplace for 10 days or a gig here and there.”
‘Tulsa King’ is the first project featuring the two icons, but since they worked so well together, it might not be the last? Or is it just wishful thinking?
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