Tulsa King is just getting started with the big character collisions, according to series lead and executive producer Sylvester Stallone and actor Frank Grillo.
While discussing what is potentially the most dangerous dustup of Season 3 — that is, when his Dwight Manfredi (Stallone) gets an unexpected visit from his nemesis-turned-quasi-ally Bill Bevilaqua (Grillo), who rightly accuses him of working with the feds — the pair reveal to TV Insider a few key secrets about what to expect from the action ahead.
Stallone, who touts Tulsa King‘s “Machiavellian” third season as being “better than any show on TV” because “there’s nothing like this,” points to that confrontation as the inflection point for Dwight. “I didn’t expect him to have the juevos, the wherewithal, the gall to show up in the middle of the night. But he came in there, and he was totally right,” Stallone remembers of Dwight’s mindset in the scene. “It’s checkmate.”
After Bill is arrested by the FBI in the final stretch of the season, he’s nowhere near done with Dwight, and fans can expect to see the two butt heads once again in Season 4.
Grillo explains, “The respect is there, but there’s always a bit of, ‘Is this guy going to get the best of me, or am I going to get the best of him?’ And that’s a constant conflict that creates the drama in this show that’s always interesting… People are like, ‘I just want to see these two guys be friends.’ I’m like, ‘No, you don’t.’ … They can come together because they have maybe a mutual enemy or a mutual objective, but at the end of the day, they’re not coming together to vacation.”
“This year [in Season 3], we’re like the ultimate frenemies,” Stallone agrees on their tenuous partnership. “But we are there because there’s a cause that’s bigger than both of us that we have to get rid of, for us to survive. And then eventually, we probably may start to turn our attention toward each other because there can only be one at the top… It’s just the way the male ego is. So this opens up a lot of drama for next season, which is going to be unbelievable.”
Grillo says he walked away “proud” of that particular scene because, “It was a tennis match with really high-level players … it was just great acting,” adding, “Performances don’t get better than that. Maybe you can be as good, but it doesn’t get better.”
And Stallone wants fans to know there’s more where that came from, too. “We do it again next season: You literally hit 10 different buttons. I mean, you’re going from here to there, humor to not humor, insightful, clever…. It’s all these little buttons that are being pushed in a scene. It’s not one note. It’s not like some of these scenes, where you’re like, ‘OK, you’re a dead man.’ That’s dull. This is gamemanship. This is what we have: gamesmanship,” he says.
Brian Douglas / Paramount+
Stallone adds that the beauty of Tulsa King, to him, is that the mobster at the center of the action is fallible, as evidenced by this scene.
“When [Bill] walks out, he had every right to blow [Dwight] away. He really did. And he says that, ‘But I’m not going to. I have every right to’… That’s what I’m talking about. It’s not a show where I’m so dominating that I never get caught off guard. And next season, that’s even 10 times more manifest.”
As for what else is in store for the Tulsa King world, which is getting its first spinoff with the Samuel L. Jackson-led Frisco King (f.k.a. NOLA King), “the sky’s the limit.” Says Stallone, “I think we can do it again. We could do California, L.A. King, it’s unlimited. Look at CSI, my God, what is that in every city?”
Tulsa King, Season 4, Premiere Date TBA, Paramount+
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