“The amount of time that we did ten episodes is the equivalent of doing five Rockys in a row, five two-hour films in a row with no break in between,” screen legend Sylvester Stallone said of Tulsa King during a TCA press conference to promote the new drama from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan. “I met Taylor a while back, actually riding horses in California and he was just working on Sicario at the time. I wanted him to write the screenplay for Rambo because I was getting lazy. Anyway, we moved on in life, and then he became very, very successful with Yellowstone. And one day, he just had this idea, called me up, pitched it to me in like three seconds. I went, ‘I'm in.’ It was very fast.” Very fast, indeed, with ten episodes produced for Paramount+, premiering November 13th.
(Brian Douglas/Paramount+)
Stallone plays Dwight “The General” Manfredi, an exiled mafia member sent to Tulsa as punishment. “The goal was to take Dwight as far away from New York and his New York experience as possible,” explained showrunner and executive producer Terence Winter about the show’s setting in Tulsa. “It is really middle America. It's as unlike New York City as you can possibly get. It's a beautiful location, but you will not mistake it for anything but what it is. You are out in wide open skies with wide open spaces everywhere. It just feels like you're in a completely different place. So for a guy like Dwight, who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, to walk out into that, and suddenly you're in the middle of corn fields and cowboys and horses everywhere, was really as alien a landscape as we could possibly put him in. And of course, we wanted to heighten his stakes as much as possible. So Tulsa was the greatest place. And certainly shooting in Oklahoma was wonderful, unlike anything any of us had been through. Really hot. But a great place to shoot, and we were really happy to be there.”
Dwight isn’t the only New York City transplant in Tulsa. “Stacy is a woman who's been transported from New York as well into Oklahoma and sort of wakes up in her 40s and is like, ‘What do I have’ and ‘Who am I,’” Andrea Savage said of her character Stacy Beale. “The thing that surprised me the most was how much humor was brought into the show and how much humor Sly brought to Dwight. I didn't see that coming. I was surprised by that when I got to see the pilot. That was the thing where it really kind of had a vibe of there's a fun and a life to it, in juxtaposition with the gangster violent stuff. And I think that's going to be really surprising for people to see, some of this humor from Sly and that in the genre.”
“The interesting thing about Tyson for me was the opportunity to step into the relatable case of taking one's life into one's own hands,” Jay Will shared about connecting with his character, who becomes part of Dwight’s inner circle in Tulsa. “As a young person, I think we all deal with that. And I think as it goes on in the cycle of one's life, once Tyson met Dwight, it was a perfect opportunity to move forward into things that I actually wanted outside of my parents and the things that they wanted for me. And it was a good opportunity to exemplify that.”
“I'd never done television,” Garrett Hedlund revealed, echoing Stallone’s feelings of the intensity of producing an hour of story in a week’s time. “But I loved it. We had the best crew, the best team possible, and so I looked forward to coming to work every day. My character within this has a lot that he relates to in a secret sort of way with Sly that brings them together, that there's this bond and there's this trust that is very unique and becomes unique throughout the story, which I found very fascinating, and I loved.” Tulsa King fuses together the genres of western and mafia. “It's something that audiences have never seen before. It's a combination of all the perfect parts of this algorithm of what everybody has been loving watching. We have the best creators in television. We have the best actors in television. It's going to be a phenomenal experience.”
“And the thing that separates it from everything else is that it's shot like a film,” concluded executive producer David C. Glasser. “These are like ten one-hour movies at the end of the day. And I think that's what separates what everybody's doing… When we went to MTV Entertainment Studios and said, ‘Look, we want to go ahead and make a mob TV show that has been separated and different than everything else,’ this was that opportunity. And we want to make it look like ten one-hour movies. And I think that's the opportunity that we were able to do here. And that's why you hear somebody like Sly who's never done TV and Garrett who's never done TV, and everybody else here who's a departure for them, that's the opportunity that I think we're going to bring to audiences here, is a genre you've heard about, but a twist that's never been done before.”
Experience something new in Tulsa King premiering November 13th on Paramount+.
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