There are a number of ways you can bag a big role in the movies, but we wouldn’t have thought insulting the writer, director, and star would be the way to go. Funnily enough, that’s exactly how Carl Weathers secured his role as Apollo Creed in the Rocky franchise, after criticising Sylvester Stallone during a script reading.
The sports movie saga may have rested on the shoulders of the Italian Stallion, but if it wasn’t for Weathers’ enthusiastic portrayal of the Rocky villain Apollo Creed in the first Rocky movie, who knows where the series would have ended up.
The story of how Weathers landed the role is a curious one, as the actor recalled to The Hollywood Reporter that criticising Stallone was the secret to his success.
“There was nobody to read with, and they said you’re going to read with the writer [Stallone],” Weather said. “We read through the scene and at the end of it, I didn’t feel like it had really sailed, that the scene had sailed, and they were quiet and there was this moment of awkwardness, I felt, anyway.”
“So I just blurted out, ‘I could do a lot better if you got me a real actor to work with.’ So I just insulted the star of the movie without really knowing it and not intending to,” Weathers added.
Turns out, Stallone felt the comments were indicative of the personality he had in mind for Apollo, and this ultimately led to Weathers getting the role. “Sometimes the mistakes are the ones that get you the gig,” Weathers joked.
Apollo’s son is now leading the action movie franchise, and doing a great job of it too, judging by our Creed 3 review. The new movie was Michael B Jordan‘s directorial debut, but there could well be a Creed 4 and a Creed anime series on the horizon given the huge success of the film.