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The wait for CREED 3 is almost over, as the third instalment of the popular film franchise hits cinemas.

And Michael B Jordan, who plays Adonis Creed, will be glad another bout of painful training is over for a while.

Jordan has played Adonis Creed - son of Apollo - since 2015 and has been suffering for his art ever since.

Sylvester Stallone, who plays Rocky Balboa in the film, praised his younger colleague for getting back up after being floored by former cruiserweight champion Tony Bellew during filming of the first film.

However, Jordan, who plays the lead character insisted he was not knocked out, as Sly claimed - but was 'definitely seeing stars'.

Bellew played the role of 'Pretty' Ricky Conlan in the first film and the pair shot a number of scenes together as their characters battled in the climactic world title fight towards the end.

At one point, Bellew's character floored Jordan's and this presented an interesting challenge for the pair of them.

Stallone also directed it and later posted footage on social media of this moment and captioned it: "Michael B Jordan, 'Young Creed' and 'getting KOd for real!' "But he got up and did it again! That's called guts!!"

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But Jordan explained on the Graham Norton Show: "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.

"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."

But Bellew heaped praise on Jordan for his skills, speaking at the premiere of the third film, he said:

“Michael B Jordan is one of the best athletes I’ve ever trained alongside,” he said.

“When we were training for Creed I, we were living in Philadelphia and we were training together on a regular basis and he is such a good athlete.

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“Give me six months [as his trainer] and I could easily win him a couple of fights, no problem at all.

“He would eat a couple of these YouTubers, no problem."

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