He did not want to be killed by the mob.
“Tulsa King” star Michael Beach was hoping not to get TKO'd by Sylvester Stallone's character Dwight, a New York mafia capo exiled to Oklahoma, in the Paramount+ series, which premiered Second Season sunday.
In Season 1, the middle character, Dwight's taxi driver father, clashes with a displaced Mafia boss when he hires his son as his personal driver.
“The idea of going head to head with Sylvester Stallone is weird. … You never know if he’s going to punch you or something, that character, because he’s always knocking people unconscious,” Beach, 60, told The Post.
The veteran actor, who had his breakout role opposite Vanessa Williams in the 1995 film “Waiting to Exhale,” had never met Stallone, making co-starring with him seem “surreal.”
“I was never in his presence.
On set, Stallone encouraged the cast to add comedic touches to the script – and was patient with those who were less experienced.
“He’s always trying to help people find the humor … ‘Why don’t you just try saying this.’ And a lot of the people on his crew, some of them, were not experienced actors, and that didn’t bother him at all,” Beach said.
“He was always trying to help them find a way to help them develop a character. He was really good about that.”
The father of eight said his own experiences as a parent helped him play the concerned patriarch in “Tulsa King.”
“One of the things about being a father is always hoping, praying that your kids follow a path that you think is right,” Beach said.
“And that doesn't mean you have to do this or that. But what you do, you do it the right way … you make sure you're respectful, responsible, accountable and honorable. And I think the father in 'Tulsa King' has no money. He works hard, but he feels like he has honor in him. And I think he worries that his son is going down a path where honor doesn't exist.”
The Boston native, who now lives in Los Angeles, once lived on St. Nicholas Avenue and West 145th Street in Washington Heights while studying at Juilliard, and recalls the jobs he held during school.
“I was teaching at a camp in East Tremont in the Bronx. I was an assistant at a movie theater on the East Side. Wendell Pierce worked there, too,” he said, referring to the Juilliard alumnus best known for his role in HBO's “The Wire.”
After graduation, Beach quickly found acting gigs, and worked several times with another icon, James Earl Jones — and even played his son in the 1996 movie “A Family Thing.”
“Probably the most amazing voiceover actor in history had a stutter,” he said of Jones, who died this week at age 93. “It was a problem he overcame early in his life, but he never got rid of it. In 'A Family Thing,' sometimes he would stutter. And if the scene was a success, he would keep it.”
Early in his 40-year career, Beach appeared in two films, “Waiting to Exhale” and “Soul Food,” where he played a cheating husband.
“So sometimes a woman would come up to me and scold me. And sometimes I was even pushed. I was just vilified, I was hated for those two movies.”
Even today, almost 30 years later, he has not been able to free himself from this stigma.
“Even today in the black community I'm considered the actor who cheats on his wife.”
This year, Beach was working on four projects simultaneously, all shooting in different locations — “Tulsa King” in Atlanta, the Paramount+ crime drama “Mayor of Kingstown” in Pittsburgh, the film “I’ll Be Right There” in upstate New York and the Netflix series “The Perfect Couple” in Massachusetts.
“So I spend a lot of my time on a plane, bouncing from one place to another,” he said.
“You know, it's a great life. There's nothing to complain about.”
