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While promoting the third season of Tulsa King, Stallone has been asked a fair number of questions about another mentor part, Rocky, the former Heavyweight Champion who now spends his days running a restaurant in Philadelphia. The first Creed movie sees Rocky train Apollo Creed’s son, Adonis, but he also has his own fight to deal with. While he comes out on top at the end, if director Ryan Coolger had it his way, the iconic character would’ve only been part of the first movie in the trilogy.
Stallone revealed in a GQ video that Coogler came to him with the idea for Creed years before the movie came out, but no matter how much the actor liked the concept, he couldn’t get on board with killing Rocky.
“I was never comfortable. I dodged that bullet for two years, three years. And Ryan Coogler was very persistent, kept pushing it,” he explained. “And we had the same agent, but I didn’t want to do it because the way he had written it, Rocky dies. He gets Lou Gehrig’s disease. And I said, ‘I have a big thing about characters like that dying.’ I’d much rather them get on a train going somewhere, and you never see them again. But to die, it will just bum the audience out completely.”
After finding a middle ground, which saw Rocky get cancer while training Adonis, it was smooth sailing from there for Stallone, who embraced the idea of stepping out of the ring.
“So once we got over that, I said, ‘Okay, we’ll give it a shot,’ And it was a lot of dramatic acting in that because I couldn’t use my body,” he said. “I wasn’t fighting. So that was a good challenge, and it turned out pretty well.”
