How Sylvester Stallone Got Al Pacino to Appear in ‘The Family Stallone’

Sophia, Sistine, Sylvester, Jennifer Flavin, and Scarlet Stallone in 'The Family Stallone'
Preview
Art Streiber/Paramount+

Don’t tell Al Pacino you’re filming a reality show if you want Al Pacino on your reality show. The Oscar winner makes a cameo in The Family Stallone trailer alongside Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV co-star Dolph Lundgren. How did Sly get everyone to say hello to his little friend on camera? Well, he was sly about it.

“I threatened him,” he tells TV Insider. OK, maybe not so sly. “I said, ‘Al, they pull you back in!’ No, I literally called him up in the afternoon and said, ‘Hey, why don’t we have a piece of pizza at Mulberry Street Pizza right in Beverly Hills?’ He goes, ‘Sure!’” Little did he expect.” The Tulsa King star says Pacino is more lighthearted than one might think.

“He’s really a nice guy — I know the Michael Corleone, he’s the Godfather, but he’s incredibly funny and talkative and animated, as you see [in The Family Stallone],” he says. “So, he’s sitting down there, and the cameras pop out from behind trash cans, behind cars. He goes, ‘What is this? What is this? I’m on a reality show? Oh my god.’ And I was expecting him to go, ‘I can’t do this. I’m outta here.’ No. He really enjoyed it! He came alive. He came up with some very funny things. He stayed there for, like, half an hour.”

Did Rambo “punk” Scarface? “Yes, I did,” he says proudly. “And there’s a few more coming like that.” As his wife, Jennifer Flavin Stallone, tells us, “There’s a few more celebrities” coming in the show’s first season, debuting May 17 on Paramount+. Sly nods his head and says, “Big time.” And no one’s safe from the Family Stallone’s pranks.

The Family Stallone takes viewers into the personal lives of Sylvester and Jennifer and their daughters Sophia, Sistine, and Scarlet. The pranks begin in the first episode when Jennifer and the girls try to pull one over on dear old dad at his 76th birthday dinner. But Sylvester tells us that later on in the series, one of his pranks on a famous friend backfires. That one, he says to his wife and daughters, “kind of punk’d me. I’m talking about you know who.”

“That’s a good one,” Sophia chimes in. As her dad adds, “He’s a big guy. You’ll see him.”

We had to ask: Why is Sylvester Stallone doing a reality TV show in the first place? Why open up his family’s personal life to the cameras? As he explains in the series premiere, it’s so he can spend more time with his family after decades of months-long, long-distance filming stints. But it’s also, as Sistine shares, so they can get  “a giant home video.”

As Sly explains, he signed on to have an archive of this point in his family’s life. “The whole point is that I know what it’s like to live our private life, but I want to keep it. I want to make a real, long memory of it. I want it to be, like, historical for me, like, ‘Aw yeah, look at that wonderful moment,'” he says. “On this show, we do things that we don’t normally do sometimes, as you’ll see later on. We’re put in situations that are a little odd, and it’s how we react to them that creates the entertainment portion of it. So, that’s why I wanted to do it. I wanted to get our personalities underneath the same footage, underneath the same umbrella. In other words, it’s all part of a plan.”

The plan unfolds in The Family Stallone Season 1.

The Family Stallone, Series Premiere, Wednesday, May 17, Paramount+