Hollywood veteran Sylvester Stallone channelled his childhood angst against his father in a Rocky II scene where he confronts his boxing coach Mickey, he said in a new podcast hosted by his daughters, opening up about being “abused” as a child by his parents.

“I didn’t have the guts. I was afraid of him (Stallone’s father) and I didn’t think I was articulate enough. When I wrote this screenplay [for Rocky II], it didn’t exist. And I said to myself, that I gotta do something to explain the frustration…wanting to say this, but you can’t say it, but you can say it to a door. But when the man’s face is in front of you, it just fills up. I was afraid of him,” the 77-year-old actor said in the Unwaxed Podcast, hosted by his daughters Sophia and Sistine.

Stallone said that he found relief when he realised that he had the chance to convey his emotions through his dialogues in Rocky. “That was pretty much a very biographical moment,” he said about venting through the scenes showing his verbal spats with Mickey in the film.

The scene in Rocky II features a confrontation when Mickey approaches Rocky to train him for a fight. “I got pain, I got experience too,” Rocky says to Mickey in a fit of rage, refusing to accept his proposal. But he eventually realised that he can’t succeed without Mickey’s guidance. He runs after him, embraces him and ultimately, reconciles with him.

“I think I said it in my documentary that people don’t realise how impressionable and vulnerable you are when you are young…like I said, soft clay. I grew up in a really bad household. It was tough. Everyone was extremely unhappy with who they were,” the Rambo star said.

“My mother and father, they certainly weren’t parents. They said, ‘Oh I can’t wait to raise a normal happy family,’ when both of them were completely discontent with who they were,” he added.

Stallone said that he spent the first four-and-a-half-years of his life in a boarding house because he was unwanted by his parents. He opened up about how he could not relate to anyone at that place because he was only a child and everyone around him were adults.

“I think it truly affected the way I interacted with people. I was kind of a loner because of that reason,” he said, opening up about how experiencing negligence from his parents and living in a boarding house during his early years impacted his overall personality.

When he was a child, Stallone felt he was unwanted by his parents. “My mother would say, ‘The only reason you’re here is because the hanger didn’t work.’ Or, ‘Bouncing down those steps didn’t cause you to get lost.’”

He added how as a child, he would think his mother was joking whenever she would verbally abuse him.

Opening up about his tactics to deal with such abuse from his parents, Stallone said, “I was so caught up in ‘unreality’...non-reality…fiction. I never went to school and I would always kind of identify with cartoon figures, mythical figures, Batman and Superman.”

Revealing how wearing self-made superhero costumes underneath his school uniform would make him feel brave and confident, Stallone said, “It got to a point when I would actually sometimes make these horrible costumes from a barber’s cape or a bathing suit and go to school. Under the clothes, I would feel like I’m the real character.”

The first film of the Rocky franchise released in 1976 and was followed by the sequels Rocky II (1979), Rocky III (1982), Rocky IV (1985), Rocky V (1990), and Rocky Balboa (2006). Stallone wrote and directed four of the five sequels, which revolve around the boxing career of Rocky Balboa.

Stallone is set to star in Justin Routt’s upcoming action-thriller Armoured, which also features Jason Patric and Josh Wiggins.