TONY BELLEW accidentally knocked out Michael B Jordan while filming CREED – but the actor revealed he was not out for the count.
Bellew, a former cruiserweight world champion, played the role of Ricky Conlan in the 2015 Rocky spin-off movie.
In the film, Conlan faces Jordan’s character Adonis Creed – son of Rocky’s former opponent-turned friend Apollo.
And while shooting the final fights scene, Bellew caught Jordan clean on the chin – so much in fact it put the American down.
Sylvester Stallone, creator of Rocky, tweeted at the time: “Michael B Jordan, ‘Young Creed’ and ‘getting KOd for real!’
“But he got up and did it again! That’s called guts!!”
Despite Stallone’s praise, Jordan revealed while on the Graham Norton Show that he was not actually unconscious.
He said: “Sly enjoys putting me through punishment, he really does, he’s so mischievous.
“In the Rocky films it’s like a badge of honour to take a real punch.
“And when you do slow-mo shots you can’t fake it because if you did a slow-mo shot and it was a miss, you would see the space and that it wouldn’t connect.
Most read in Boxing
“So you have to take a real punch. Sly gets up and says, ‘Michael, listen, you gotta take a real punch.’
“I’m like, ‘Ugh, okay, did you do it?’ He says, ‘Yeah, I did it, did it a bunch of times.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, if you did it, I’ll do it.’
“We ended up setting up the cameras and I took a real punch. See the crazy thing was, I wasn’t technically ‘knocked out’.
“But I got hit, went down and the camera panned in. The first time we did it, Tony’s glove was in the way so we didn’t see it – so we had to do it again.
“So we did it the second time, I got hit and I could feel the energy of the studio. I was like, ‘It must have really looked good because everybody is quiet.’
“I was definitely seeing stars, I was not all there, smelling the canvas and everything. It smelled like Pine-Sol.
“But yeah, I took a real punch, it felt like I was in a car accident for like four days afterwards.
“Tony said he only went 40 per cent.”
