Movies may be fictional, but there are real people making everything on the screen look as real as possible. This means that when you’re making a movie about a professional boxer, there’s a very real possibility that you’re going to get punched in the face. The possibility became a reality on the set of Creed as Michael B. Jordan was apparently actually knocked out while filming. His co-star Sylvester Stallone has been nice enough to share the video online so we can all watch the actor get dropped like a ton of bricks.
Ouch! The behind the scenes look that Rocky himself posted on Twitter shows Michael B. Jordan getting ready for a scene where, to be fair, he’s supposed to go down. On the call of "action" Jordan steps into the punch, takes it in the head and goes down. It doesn’t look like the punch was pulled, even a little bit. Jordan takes the shot straight to the head and drops. The fact that the extras in the audience begin their normal noise, as would be expected, implies that Jordan was supposed to go down but according to Sylvester Stallone the actor was really knocked out here.
We’re sure it’s not the only punch that Michael B. Jordan ended up taking over the course of filming but it may very well have been the hardest. The worst part is that if he got up and had to do it again, as Stallone says, then apparently getting actually KO’d wasn’t a good enough take for the film. Some directors are harsh. Also, we don’t really know how long it took Jordan to get up and do it again. After a shot like that, it may have been a little bit. We know that Jordan put himself in amazing shape to get ready to play the son of Apollo Creed, so he was probably in as good shape to take the punch as would have been possible. Still, that still hurts just watching it.
That’s to be expected when the guy punching you in the head is an actual professional boxing champion. Tony Bellew plays "Pretty" Ricky Conlan in the movie, but in reality, he is a former WBC International light heavyweight champion. He knows more about actually punching people than he does about pretending to. He’s, apparently at least, a little proud of the moment, as Bellew retweeted Stallone’s clip to all of his own followers as well.
Sylvester Stallone isn’t the only one who thought the actor did a fantastic job, his on-screen father, Carl Weathers has also sung the praises of the film. It’s become a bonafide hit at this point both with audiences and critics. It’s apparently also a "hit" with professional boxers.
