Sylvester Stallone reveals how father’s ‘Rocky’ cameo lead to ‘nasty’ fight

Sylvester Stallone has recalled a “nasty altercation” with his father on the set of Rocky.

The 80-year-old icon spoke about his tricky relationship with his father Frank Stallone Sr in a new interview with The New York Times to promote his forthcoming memoir The Steps, which will be published in the UK on September 29.

The three-time Oscar nominee said that he had landed his “tough” father a cameo as the bell ringer in the 1976 film’s climactic match, which sees his Rocky go up against Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed.

“It was like: I just want you to love me for a little bit,” Stallone said. “Like, look what I did! Share it with me. I know you thought I was a fool my whole life, but here we are.”

On the day that they shot the scene, however, Frank Sr did not ring the bell “properly” and allowed his son to keep “fighting and fighting and fighting.”

“Everything’s choreographed. It’s one, two, three, four, bell. Not six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Carl Weathers is like, ‘What’s going on?'” recalled Stallone.

“And of course it ended up in an altercation by the end. It got really nasty,” he said. “A really bad Italian drama. But for a moment I thought, Jesus, he’d be proud.”

Regardless of his fight with his father, Sylvester Stallone went on to win an Oscar for his lead performance in Rocky, a film that later spawned several sequels and a spin-off franchise led by Michael B Jordan.