Trevante Rhodes wishes he could have gone at least one round with the champ.
Rhodes plays embattled former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson in Hulu's Mike, premiering Aug. 25, and he laments the fact that he wasn't able to touch gloves with Tyson in order to prepare.
"It would have been great for me to train with Mike, from just a feeling standpoint," Rhodes exclusively told E! News. "Just as energy, you know what I mean? You'd have the opportunity to feel that heat with somebody to be able to convey it just a little bit better. Maybe one day."
As for what he would do if he did come face to face with Tyson? "I would like to give him a hug and ask him how he's doing."
For those not caught up on the drama, on Aug. 6, Tyson spoke out against the series and warned it was completely unauthorized. "Don't let Hulu fool you," Tyson wrote on Instagram. "I don't support their story about my life. It's not 1822. It's 2022. They stole my life story and didn't pay me."
At Hulu's Television Critics Tour panel Aug. 4, Mike showrunner Karen Gist explained she and the other writers wanted to "tell an unbiased story and have the audience decide what they think or feel."
And, according to Rhodes, Mike finds a way of balancing Tyson's truths—including the highs of his boxing glory to the lows of his 1992 rape conviction—while still making him feel like a human being.
"It's being present and understanding that complexity of a man," he said. "I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to convey it, to show myself in a particular way."
And it wasn't just Rhodes who didn't have access to the real-life player he was portraying, as Russell Hornsby, who plays controversial boxing promoter and one-time Tyson confidant Don King, revealed to E! News he felt similarly about the unfortunate lack of face time with the now 91-year-old.
"It would have been nice to have been able to sit down with Don for a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, something like that," Hornsby told E!. "Sit with him for a few hours, a whole day, a couple days a week and just get a sense of what his thought process was and what he was thinking about, what he was living with."
Nonetheless, the two actors persevered and detailed to E! what it took to play two flawed, complicated men. For Hornsby, he said that he never looked at his character "as evil or bad," adding, "I look at him as being human, as being real. I approach it that way. But you also have to look at the character's objectives. What are his wants, his desires and his needs?"
Of course, Hornsby still has many questions for King: "What were you afraid of? What were your fears? Because you get a sense that Don had everything covered and he had everything handled. He showed that in his smile and his guile. But I would really want to know, underneath all that, what was he running from?"
Mike premieres Aug. 25 on Hulu.