Despite having been such a big part of Hollywood for nearly 50 years, Sylvester Stallone has somehow focused the majority of his career on features, with only a handful of TV appearances in that span. That all changes with the upcoming crime drama Tulsa King, which connects Stallone to one of TV’s biggest and still-rising creative stars in Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan. The series is currently filming in Oklahoma, and we thankfully didn’t have to wait very long to get our first peek at what’s on the way for Paramount+ subscribers.
The streaming platform revealed the first look at Sylvester Stallone’s Tulsa King character, a dapper-looking gent by the name of Dwight “The General” Manfredi. The actor shared the pic of himself as Manfredi on Instagram, and he looks like a dude who could either be wistfully enjoying a view of his city’s sky, or a dude contemplating how to logistically crash a skyscraper directly down onto an enemy’s skull. Such is Stallone’s face. Check it out below.
Anybody whose nickname is “The General” has to meet a level of expectations from others, and considering Dwight Manfredi is a bigwig in the underworld, that all checks out. In the world of Tulsa King, Manfredi is a New York mafia capo who spent the past 25 years in jail. Upon his release from incarceration, he’s not exactly welcomed home with open arms by his own underboss, and is instead forced to relocate to Tulsa.
While the image above is fairly peaceful, regardless of any potential ominousness, Stallone’s character isn’t a dummy, and doesn’t read into the situation as peaceful at all. Suspicious that he’s being played, Manfredi starts recruiting his own crew in Tulsa with the goal of sparking a new criminal empire more than 1,300 miles away from his former stomping grounds.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to Tulsa, but I can’t help but feel like Dwight Manfredi would stand out in most crowds. Maybe it’s the dark tones of his clothing that emanate a sense of mafia menace, or maybe it’s just Stallone’s own weathered face. I’m sure the difference in accents only drives that divide further.
A couple of days before Paramount+ delivered the first look goods for Tulsa King, Sylvester Stallone shared a video message with fans in the midst of filming (presumably from his trailer). Here’s how he said things were going in the early weeks of filming:
Hello, everyone. I’m in Oklahoma working on Tulsa King, and I’m having the greatest time. This is a wonderful project, great actors. The synergy is getting better and better. You see, when you start a series, it’s like the first week of practice on a team. It takes a while to get the gears going, and after a couple of weeks, you start flowing, and you’re starting to find little idiosyncrasies in your characters, and you’re starting to understand the rhythms of other actors. And so, all I can say is I think it’s gonna be a big hit, and I’m proud to be involved in it.
Given how good the actor-turned-writer/director Taylor Sheridan is at crafting hilarious and hard-hitting dialogue on Yellowstone and in his screenplays, I can’t wait to see the kinds of lines that Stallone will be delivering when Tulsa King kicks off. And if things get a little meta, with Manfredi hypothesizing who would win in a fight between Rocky and Rambo, I’m into that.
While it’s not clear at this point when Tulsa King will make its streaming debut on Paramount+, but it’ll almost necessarily have to air alongside one of Taylor Sheridan’s many other TV shows in some form of development or production at the moment. Next up is presumably Yellowstone’s 6666 spinoff, with the flagship’s fifth season set to film through the summer; but that’s not even accounting for the 1932 spinoff or the non-Yellowstone series on the way, such as Billy Bob Thornton’s Land Man, Zoe Saldana’s Lioness, the Bass Reeves series, and probably more.
