‘Tulsa King’ star Michael Beach was really hoping not to get TKO’d by Sylvester Stallone’s character
He didn’t want a Mob hit.
“Tulsa King” star Michael Beach was hoping not to get TKO’d by Sylvester Stallone’s character Dwight, a NY Mafia capo exiled to Oklahoma, in the Paramount+ series, which premieres its second season Sunday.
In Season 1, Beach’s character, the father of Dwight’s cab driver, confronts the displaced mob boss after he hires his son as his personal driver.
“It’s weird, the idea of going toe to toe with Sylvester Stallone. . . . You never know if he’s about to punch you or something, that character, cause he’s always knocking people out,” Beach, 60, told The Post.
The veteran actor, who landed his breakthrough role in the 1995 film “Waiting to Exhale” opposite Vanessa Williams, had never met Stallone, which made co-starring with him “surreal.”
“I’d never even been in his presence. It’s definitely a career check because he’s Sylvester Stallone. He’s Rocky. I was a teenager when ‘Rocky’ came out,” he gushed.
On set, Stallone encouraged the cast to add comedic touches to the script — and had patience with those who were less experienced.
“He’s always trying to help people find the humor . . . ‘Why don’t you just try to say this.’ And a lot of the people in his crew, some were not seasoned actors, and that didn’t bother him at all,” Beach said.
“He was always just trying to help them find a way to help them develop a character. He was really cool about that.”
The father of eight said his own experiences as a parent helped him play the role of a concerned patriarch in “Tulsa King.”
“One of the things about being a father is always hoping, praying that your children follow a path that you think is the right one,” Beach said.
“And it doesn’t mean that you have to do this or you have to do that. But what you do, you do it the right way . . . you make sure that you’re being respectful, responsible, accountable and honorable. And I think the father in ‘Tulsa King,’ the dude has no money. He works his ass off, but he feels like he has honor in that. And I think he’s concerned that his son is going down the road where honor doesn’t exist.”
The Boston native, who now resides in Los Angeles, once lived on St. Nicholas Avenue and West 145th Street in Washington Heights while attending Juilliard, and recalled the jobs he had while at school.
“I was teaching at a camp up in East Tremont in the Bronx. I was an usher in a movie theater on the East Side. Wendell Pierce worked there as well,” he said, referring to the fellow Juilliard alum known for his role on HBO’s “The Wire.”
After graduation, Beach found acting gigs quickly, and worked with another icon, James Earl Jones, multiple times — and even played his son in the 1996 film “A Family Thing.”
“Probably the most amazing voiceover actor in history had a stutter,” he said of Jones, who died this week at 93. “That’s something he overcame early on in his life, but he never got rid of. In ‘A Family Thing,’ every once in a while, he would stutter. And if the scene worked, then they would keep it.”
Early on in his 40-year career, Beach was in two movies, “Waiting to Exhale” and “Soul Food,” where he played a cheating husband.
“So every once in a while, a female would come up to me and would just berate me. And a couple of times, I was pushed. I was just vilified, just hated for those two movies.”
Even now, almost 30 years later, he can’t shake the stigma.
“Even to this day, in the black community, I am considered the actor who cheats on his wife.”
This year, Beach was working on four projects at once that all shot in different places — “Tulsa King” in Atlanta; the Paramount+ crime drama “Mayor of Kingstown” in Pittsburgh; the movie “I’ll Be Right There” in upstate New York; and the Netflix’ series “The Perfect Couple” in Massachusetts.
“So I spend a lot of time on planes jumping around from place to place,” he said.
“You know, it’s a great life. It’s nothing to complain about.”
