Sylvester Stallone has claimed he was caught off guard after Donald Trump named him as one of three “special ambassadors” to Hollywood last year.

Trump announced on Truth Social that the Rocky star, 80, along with vocal Republican actors Jon Voight and Mel Gibson, would “serve as my eyes and ears” to bring back business lost to “foreign countries.” It was never made clear what the job entailed.

Asked if he had any reservations about the appointment in a new interview with The Times of London, Stallone responded: “Yes. Yes, because Hollywood, I guess it’s like feudal states. They have their little kingdoms. You don’t go in and tell six studios how to do things. And Mel Gibson and Jon Voight, we’re kind of do-our-own-thing people. No, it won’t work.”

Asked if he explained his concerns to the president, Stallone continued: “Yes, and I said thank you and ciao, because it’s impossible. Hollywood works and it will evolve. It’s corporate and corporate people won’t want to hear me tell them about finance.”

Asked then why he accepted the appointment, Stallone replied that he hadn’t. “Well, it just happened. I was watching TV one night and they go, ‘So Stallone and Mel Gibson and Jon Voight will be …’ And I went, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Excuse me? Really?’ Because if they had asked me in the beginning, I would have said, this is not possible,” he said.

The White House did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment.

Stallone has spoken out in support of Trump in the past. At a Mar-a-Lago black-tie gala held to celebrate Trump’s election victory in 2024, Stallone introduced the president-elect as a “really mythical character.”

“This individual does not exist on this planet. Nobody in the world could have pulled off what he pulled off, so I’m in awe,” he said.

He went on to call Trump “the second George Washington.”

Voight, meanwhile, has called Trump the “greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.”

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The Oscar winner also supported Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, saying that it was a “battle of righteousness versus Satan.”

During an event at Mar-a-Lago in 2024, Gibson called the Biden administration “four years of thinly veiled Marxism.” He added that the new Trump administration would lead to “a four-year grace period.”

“We’ll see how much this administration can claw back from the Philistines,” Gibson said.

In December last year, Trump awarded Stallone with a Kennedy Center Honor alongside singers Gloria Gaynor and George Strait, the rock band Kiss, and actor Michael Crawford.

Trump introduced Stallone as “a friend of mine, a wonderful person, a really spectacular person, one of the true great movie stars there are.”