In His First TV Role, Sylvester Stallone Plays Complicated Character As ‘Tulsa King’ Combines Gangster And Western Genres

Sylvester Stallone has been trying to get a gangster role for years. After some twists and turns, including one memorable failure, it’s finally happened.

“I was rejected to be one of the 200 extras who basically stood behind a wedding cake in The Godfather in 1970,” says Stallone of something that happened over 50 years ago, but that clearly influenced his career, as he explains, “I’d been trying to get in gangster films, and it just never happened.

“So finally, everything comes to those who wait,” he says of headlining the drama Tulsa King in which he plays, yes, a gangster.

The series follows mafia capo Dwight “The General” Manfredi who, following his release from prison after 25 years for a murder he committed to protect his boss, is exiled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he works to build a new criminal empire with a group of unlikely characters.

After a movie career spanning six decades, this is Stallone’s first television series. On coming to TV, Stallone says that when he began in the entertainment industry, there was a big separation between film actors and television actors with no crossover.

He says that thankfully this thinking has shifted. “Now you have so many fine actors and writers specifically aiming for a TV career, to create these streaming shows that have such depth and give people a chance to branch out.”

Given this, Stallone says, “I’m glad I just finally got an opportunity to jump on this train, really.”

He is surprised, however, that TV is, ‘harder, faster, and longer’ than working in film.

“You have to be mercurial. You have to work out of sync a lot of times with sequences that don’t follow the natural order of things. But most importantly, you have to keep your energy up.”

He adds, “Put it this way — in the amount of time that we did ten episodes, it’s the equivalent of doing five Rocky [movies] in a row; five two-hour films in a row with no break in between.”

Terry Winter, showrunner & executive producer of Tulsa King, says that the uniqueness of the series lies in, “foremost, taking a gangster out of his natural element and dropping him into what feels like another planet.”

The choice of locale plays a key role, with Winter explaining, “[Dwight] is encountering challenges [that] are very different from the things he would experience in New York in a traditional mob setting. The goal was to take Dwight as far away from [that] experience as possible. Tulsa felt perfect to me. It is really middle America. It’s as unlike New York City as you can possibly get. It’s a beautiful location, but you will not mistake it for anything but what it is.”

This change is perfect for the lead character, says Winter. “For a guy like Dwight, who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, to walk out and suddenly you’re in the middle of corn fields and cowboys and horses everywhere, was really as alien a landscape as we could possibly put him in.”

He says it’s this mash-up of elements that makes Tulsa King so different from a ‘traditional’ mafia story.

“It’s the mixing of these two tried and true genres — the western and gangster genres.” He adds, with a mixture of seriousness and humor, “It reminds me of those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials where the peanut butter truck crashed into the chocolate truck and now you’ve got something that’s better than the two separate things.”

In addition to this, Winter says that he also loved the idea of, “exploring a man in the twilight of his years who is now looking back and questioning all of his life’s prior choices, all of his loyalties, all the things he did, having a very limited amount of time to rectify those things. It was the thing that really grabbed me right off the bat.”

With more about the main character, Winter says, “Because of who Dwight is and the actor portraying him, he’s really smart. He’s witty. He’s sarcastic. He’s dry. He’s super intelligent. So, there’s a huge pallet of personality traits in this guy that just makes writing it so much fun.”

Stallone jumps in quickly, with a laugh, to say, “I’m certifiable nuts is what he’s saying, but I appreciate it.”

Talking about the relatable of the series, Stallone says that it helps when, “the audience can say, ‘Oh, that’s kind of what I’m going through. I didn’t think a gangster went through that.’”

He points out that, after all, “We all are bound by the common frailties of man,” saying that because of this, viewers will understand, “the dynamics of what these characters are going through.”

‘Tulsa King’ is available for streaming beginning Sunday, November 13th on Paramount+