?Sylvester Stallone? Discusses ‘Creed’ And His Road To The 2016 ?Academy Awards?

Sylvester Stallone has received Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, for his role in Ryan Coogler’s Creed. Stallone has been acting since 1970, but he made a real big leap in his career in 1976, with the very first Rocky film. It was a screenplay that was written by Sylvester Stallone, for which he earned a Best Actor in a Leading Role nomination, and was also nominated for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen at the Academy Awards in 1977. The actor himself talks about his early days in his career in an interview for the ABC News special Journey to the Oscars.

“I lived in basically this flop house, $26 a week, very transient, and you shared a floor with 10 people,” Stallone said. “I couldn’t even get casted as an Italian. I said, ‘If there is one movie I can definitely get into, it would be The Godfather because there’s a party scene and there’s three hundred guests.’ They said no.”

But this turned out to be a perfect opportunity for him. So Stallone got to work on his own story, involving an Italian boxer, and wrote and completed the screenplay in only three-and-a-half days. Once he got it into the hands of the studio, they wanted to offer him $360,000 for the script. However, Sylvester was not interested in selling it, unless he could also star as Rocky in the film, which is not something that happened very often back then. This is one of the more legendary stories in Hollywood, because the studio actually allowed him to play the role. Stallone was only 28 years old and was also the third man in history to receive two nominations for the same film, with Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles being the other two.

“I just didn’t understand how the rules of life were played at that point, but this character I understood,” Stallone said.

Frankly, that was the smartest decision Sylvester could’ve made, not only earning himself two nominations, but the film also went on to win Best Picture for that year. So, it’s rather poetic that decades later, Sylvester Stallone is nominated for Best Supporting Actor in the seventh entry in the Rocky franchise, under the very skillful direction of Ryan Coogler. He was very hesitant to be in the film, but Coogler was able to convince him with a very specific story that he had came up with.

“I never wanted to do this movie,” Stallone said. “I thought sick Rocky is exactly what is so counter-intuitive to what the optimistic aspect of what Rocky really is designed for…. If you’re afraid of something, that’s the commitment of the artist. That’s his duty to pursue the unknown, to go some place where he’s literally at odds with himself.”

Sylvester Stallone has garnered a considerable amount of praise for his role as Rocky in Creed, and has already won several awards. 2016 could finally be the year that he wins the Academy Award, which he has yet to win.

“This is a really special moment in my life because there are not that many moments left. You know they are really getting very special,” Sylvester said. The actor has some pretty stiff competition this year; he is nominated alongside Christian Bale (The Big Short), Tom Hardy (The Revenant), Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight), and Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies). With this lineup, it comes down to Hardy and Ruffalo, if Stallone doesn’t win. Considering that Sylvester is 69 years old, the Academy may just give him a sort of a Lifetime Achievement award.

Will Sylvester Stallone finally win the Oscar? We’ll find out this Sunday.

[Photo by Mark Davis/Getty Images for Santa Barbara International Film Festival]