As far back as he can remember, Sylvester Stallone wanted to play a gangster. Further back, even, than Goodfellas. In fact, he tells Empire, back in the 1970s he tried to hustle his way into Francis Ford Coppola’s genre-defining classic The Godfather, hoping to pop up in the background of one of the most iconic opening acts of all time. “I went to Paramount, and said, ‘Can I be an extra in the wedding scene?’,” he recalls, speaking to Empire in the Glass Onion issue. “They said, ‘Yeah, we don’t know if you’re the type of guy.’ I go, ‘I’m not the type? To play in the background, hiding behind a fucking wedding cake?’” It wasn’t meant to be – but five decades on, Stallone is at last getting to play a Mafia guy in Taylor Sheridan’s upcoming series Tulsa King.

In the series, from the creator of TV mega-hit Yellowstone, Stallone is Dwight ‘The General’ Manfredi – a capo freshly released from 25 years in jail, who’s sent to Oklahoma to build up a new base of operations for his criminal family. “Finally I get my gangster shot 50 years later, and that’s perfect,” he says. “Everything comes to those who wait.” It’s a series that takes the gangster genre and mashes it up with Sheridan’s chosen wheelhouse, the Western. “He said, ‘I want to do a show about a gangster going west’,” says Stallone. “He’s very hung up on the Western, but how does it manifest itself across the country? Okay, take a gangster and put them right next to a cactus, and let the fun begin.” It was an offer that Stallone, appropriately, couldn’t refuse.