Sylvester Stallone says he was rejected for a role as an extra on the iconic gangster film The Godfather. Stallone has been a movie star ever since he played Rocky Balboa in the original Rocky way back in 1976. Now he’s making a new career move, taking on a lead role on a TV series for the first time in his career.
Stallone’s scripted TV starring debut comes as the lead character in Tulsa King, the newest Paramount+ series from the incredibly prolific Taylor Sheridan. Headed up by showrunner Terence Winter of The Sopranos fame, Tulsa King concerns a New York mob capo named Dwight “The General” Manfredi (Stallone), who leaves prison after 25 years only to be sent into veritable exile in the relative backwater of Oklahoma. But in true Stallone underdog fashion, Manfredi turns around his situation by forming his own crew and getting to criminal work.
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With Tulsa King getting set to debut on Paramount+, Stallone had occasion to speak to Empire about his prior experience in gangster-related movies. As it happens, a young Stallone tried to get into the biggest gangster movie of all – Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather – but was ultimately rejected. According to Stallone, he didn’t seek a big role in The Godfather, but just wanted to be a part of the epic film in any way possible. He recalled:
“I went to Paramount, and said, ‘Can I be an extra in the wedding scene?’ They said, ‘Yeah, we don’t know if you’re the type of guy.’ I go, ‘I’m not the type? To play in the background, hiding behind a f**king wedding cake?’”
The Godfather wedding scene is of course an iconic sequence that introduces audiences to all the movie’s main players, including Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone, Al Pacino’s Michael, James Caan’s Sonny and Diane Keaton’s Kay. But however hard fans look at the sequence, they’ll never catch a glimpse of a young Stallone peeking out from behind a wedding cake, because producers wouldn’t even hire him for this modest role. As Stallone himself put it to Empire when again talking about Tulsa King, “Finally I get my gangster shot 50 years later, and that’s perfect.”
Of course hardcore Stallone fans know it has not actually been 50 years since the actor got his last “gangster shot” on-screen. That gangster shot in fact came back in 1991 with Oscar, a comedic mob movie starring Stallone as Depression-era kingpin Angelo "Snaps" Provolone. But Stallone perhaps can be forgiven for having apparently forgotten about Oscar, a box office flop that made just $23 million on a budget of $35 million. Now Stallone does get a shot in a serious gangster project, playing a non-comedic mobster in a story with Western overtones. Tulsa King arrives on Paramount+ on November 13, 2022.