‘The Family Stallone’ star called himself “the luckiest son of a bitch in the world” as he looked back on his 35-year marriage, which nearly ended around the time the reality show filmed
Even Rocky Balboa gets swept off his feet by love.
On Wednesday’s episode of The Family Stallone, Sylvester Stallone and his wife Jennifer Flavin looked back on the first time they met during a night out in Hollywood in the ‘80s.
With Sylvester off in Atlantic City, New Jersey at his brother Frank’s concert, Jennifer invited over her pal Kirsten.
“You have known Sly now for 35 years,” Jennifer observed told her best friends since middle school.
Kirsten affirmed, “I was there the night you met.”
In a confessional interview, Sly, now 76, recounted his version of the evening.
“I remember vividly the first time I met Jennifer,” he said. “I was in this dark restaurant, a few people. She came in and, whoa! Something happened. I just felt, like, this jolt, like — ‘Oh, did we just have a minor earthquake or something?'”
Kirsten took note at the time. “I’ll never forget seeing his face when he saw you for the first time,” she said to Jennifer. “I witnessed it.”
Jennifer, 54, felt the connection, too: “We just hit it off, it was crazy. We were inseparable all night.”
After the restaurant, the trio headed to a nightclub — and Jennifer insisted on taking her own car instead of joining Sly in his limo.
“He’s like, ‘Come in the limo,’” Jennifer recalled to Kirsten. “We’re like, ‘No, we’re good! I’ve got the Dodge Duster parked in the back. We’ll follow you there.”
The three-time Oscar nominee remembered his first impression of the car.
“She has this Dodge Duster, Slimer colored, missing one headlight and a gas rag hanging out the back like a Molotov cocktail,” Sylvester told the cameras.
But the beat-up car didn’t affect how Sly felt about its owner.
“Things, as they say, happen when you least expect it,” the Tulsa King star said. “Nobody knows what life is going to bring. And then 35 years later, you look at your beautiful family and you realize, you’re the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.”
Sylvester and Jennifer dated for six years after meeting in 1988. They briefly split in 1994 but got back together the following year. The couple welcomed their first of three daughters, Sophia, in August 1996. They tied the knot in 1997 and had two more children, Sistine and Scarlet, in June 1998 and May 2002, respectively.
Last August, Jennifer filed for divorce from Sylvester, claiming he “engaged in the intentional dissipation, depletion and/or waste of marital assets which has had an adverse economic impact on the marital estate.” Sly denied the claims.
The next month, however, Sylvester and Jennifer reconciled. A Florida court filing stated that the pair determined “that is in the best interests of each of them individually, and more importantly collectively as a family, to resolve all issues attendant to the dissolution of their marriage in a dignified, amicable and private manner out-of-court.”
New episodes of The Family Stallone drop Wednesdays on Paramount+.