Hey, guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks,

as always, for clicking and listening along. Got a great one for you this week with an honest

to goodness American icon, Sylvester Stallone. Yeah, we got Rocky, guys. We got Rambo, guys. We got the man who

stars in the hit Paramount Plus series Tulsa King in that series. Stallone plays a disgraced,

kind of exiled New York mobster, who was once a big shot in the New York mob goes to jail for 25 years.

And when he gets out, the mob bosses say, we're sending you to Tulsa, Oklahoma to run a new operation out there.

And that's where the series picks up.

The most popular, most stream thing on Paramount Plus, really good series, hints, dare I say, of the Sopranos in terms of his portrayal of a mob boss,

not sort of the cliched version of a thuggy old mob boss.

So great part for him.

And his first time in a scripted series, of course, after a legendary movie career that began

with Rocky, the 1976 blockbuster and critical hit, nominated for 10 Academy Awards

at won Best Picture in 1977.

Famously, Stallone wrote that movie, Alone, Living in New York, kind of based on the underdog

Rocky Marciano real life story, but so much more than that.

Set in Philadelphia, where he lived for a time in real life, he wrote it himself, took it around to studios who said, we love the story, we don't love the idea of you, unknown actor, playing the lead role. They wanted famous people in it. They wanted Redford or Newman or someone like that to play the lead role. He was offered tons of money for the script, but he insisted on

being the star. He hung in there and hung in there until he found a deal that paid him much,

much, much, much less money to star in it. The rest is history. He's gone on to all the big

movies he has made. And now later this year, after 50 years of work,

we'll be honored with a Kennedy Center honors. So a lot to talk to him about. He was nice

enough to invite us to his home where he spends the summer out on New York's Long Island, as you

can imagine, a beautiful place. We sat out on his back porch on a beautiful late summer afternoon.

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