There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes as actors prepare for their roles. Many actors engage in “method acting” where they go to extreme lengths to get into character. For example, Jack Nicholson lived in a psychiatric ward with real patients in order to prepare for his role in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. For “Creed”, Michael B. Jordan decided to take a real punch.
In the clip Jordan gets knocked out, hitting the mat pretty hard. In fact, Sylvester Stallone – who told Jordan he needed to take the punch- recently told Rotten Tomatoes that Jordan was “knocked cold” from the punch, though he adds, “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
Jordan says this shot was the exact moment he was “initiated into the world of Rocky”, and he’s pretty proud of it.
If you didn’t already know, while filming Rocky IV, Stallone asked co-star Dolph Lundgren—a.k.a. Ivan Drago—to try and “really” knock him out. “Bad idea,” Stallone later recalled. “Later that night my blood pressure goes up to 260, I go to the hospital, they put me in an emergency jet, and fly me back to America. Next thing I know I’m in intensive care for five days with nuns walking around. He hit my heart so hard that it banged against my ribs and started to swell, and that usually happens in car accidents. So I was hit by a truck!”
