Sylvester Stallone turned 80 this summer, and this week he described himself with a word nobody in Hollywood would dare use about him: “idiot.” The reason was his own stunt work. Across five decades of throwing himself into fight scenes, the bill has come to nine back surgeries — and yet today, October 16, he opens the fourth season of Tulsa King on Paramount+, carrying a hit series on the same back.
It is worth pausing on how unlikely that sentence is. Stallone was not supposed to be a movie star at all, let alone an octogenarian leading man. A forceps injury at his birth in New York in 1946 severed a nerve and left part of his face paralyzed, along with the slurred speech that casting directors treated as a disqualification. He was broke, occasionally homeless, and taking whatever work existed when he sat down and wrote Rocky in a matter of days — then refused to sell the script unless he starred in it. The film was made for about a million dollars in 1976 and won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The Franchise King, and the Cost
Rocky made him immortal; Rambo, starting with First Blood in 1982, made him a global industry. Through the 1980s, Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger essentially were the action genre. But the genre ran on his body, and the body kept receipts. There were the ordinary accumulations of a hundred fight scenes, and then there were the famous ones — a neck broken during a fight scene with Steve Austin on The Expendables in 2010 that required surgery and a metal plate, on a film he was also directing, at 63.
The 1990s and 2000s were less kind. The hits thinned out, the parodies piled up, and by the standards of his own peak, Stallone looked finished more than once. What he did instead became the pattern of his career: he went back to the two characters he owned outright and rebuilt. Rocky Balboa in 2006 was supposed to be a farewell and played like a resurrection. Creed in 2015 went further — Stallone, now supporting another man’s story, gave the performance of his life and won a Golden Globe, with an Academy Award nomination alongside it.
Fifty Years, By the Numbers
Our own ledger of the career, because the scale of it is easy to forget:
- 9 films in the Rocky saga, from Rocky (1976) to Creed III (2023) — a character sustained across 47 years
- 5 Rambo films, from First Blood (1982) to Last Blood (2019)
- 4 Expendables films, launched at age 64 with a cast of fellow action survivors
- 3 Academy Award nominations — two for Rocky, as actor and writer, and one for Creed, 39 years later
- 9 back surgeries, the number he gave interviewers this week
- 1 television leading role: Tulsa King, taken on at 76, now entering its fourth season
No other action star of his generation is still opening seasons. Schwarzenegger works; Stallone headlines.
Why Stallone Matters Now
The interesting thing about the “idiot” remark is that it was not really regret. In the same round of interviews, Stallone talked about leaving California for Florida in 2024 because he had grown, in his words, complacent and dull — a man of 78 moving states to keep himself sharp, and saying the move left him invigorated. That is the thread that runs from the broke kid who would not sell Rocky without himself attached to the 80-year-old discussing his surgical history like a season injury report: the work is the point, and the damage is simply what the work costs.
Tulsa King’s Dwight Manfredi — an old gangster exiled to Oklahoma, building an empire out of leftovers — is as close to autobiography as television gets. Stallone keeps playing men who were counted out and declined to stay down. At this point it is less a role than a record. Nine surgeries in, the count-out still has not come.
More from NotedLives:
- Harrison Ford Was a Carpenter Before He Became One of Hollywood’s Biggest Stars — https://notedlives.com/harrison-ford-was-a-carpenter-before-he-became-one-of-hollywoods-biggest-stars/
- Daryl Hall at 80: The Soulful Voice Behind America’s Most Successful Duo — https://notedlives.com/daryl-hall-at-80-the-soulful-voice-behind-americas-most-successful-duo/
Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
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