Actor and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone has spent decades playing men who fight back, but when it came to his father, he chose forgiveness.
“It’s just generational,” Stallone said in a Sept. 29 interview with TODAY WITH JENNA & SHEINELLE, explaining that his father’s own upbringing helped him understand their difficult relationship.
That answer came as co-hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones discussed his childhood and his new book, The Steps: A Memoir. Asked whether he had been able to forgive his father, Stallone answered affirmatively, then pointed to the way his father grew up.
He also remembered a warmer side of his father later in life. His response held both parts of the relationship together: a difficult beginning and a father he remembered more fondly toward the end.
But the interview wasn’t only about the home he came from. When the conversation turned to the family he built, Stallone gave his wife, businesswoman Jennifer Flavin Stallone, credit for a quality he said she had passed on to their children: putting other people’s concerns first.
“I didn’t have that,” he said after describing his wife’s generosity and the way she passed it on to their children. He contrasted her approach with his own more protective, territorial instincts.
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Stallone acknowledged that he hadn’t understood family dynamics well earlier in life. Asked about improving as a parent with age, he agreed that he had; he didn’t claim he had always known what to do.
Jennifer and their daughters, Sophia, Sistine and Scarlet Stallone, also appeared with him in THE FAMILY STALLONE. Here, though, he wasn’t pitching a reality series; he was talking about what his family means to him.
“This is it,” Stallone said while discussing his family, describing them as the jewels in his life. He praised his wife’s kindness rather than turning the conversation back to his accomplishments.
His memoir, which arrived Sept. 29 from William Morrow, revisits the climb that made him famous. His official website describes a narrative running from his arrival in New York in 1969 to ROCKY’s Best Picture victory at the 1977 Academy Awards.
An authorized excerpt published by CBS News recalls how frustration over not getting an opportunity helped him imagine a boxer whose dreams had already taken a beating. The character gave him a way to tell an underdog story that reached beyond his own struggles as an actor.
ROCKY eventually won three Oscars, including Best Picture, while Stallone earned nominations for his leading performance and screenplay. In the TODAY interview, however, he resisted the idea that reaching the top means the work ends.
“You keep moving forward,” he said while discussing the challenges that continue with age. Even a small step still counted in his description of perseverance.
His family reflections put another kind of progress alongside the career milestones: learning to parent better, recognizing his wife’s selflessness and extending forgiveness to his father. The man who made an underdog’s climb famous is still talking about the steps he needs to take.
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