The 80-year-old icon weighs in on the new movie about his journey to starring as Rocky Balboa.
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Ahead of its Nov. 6 release, I Play Rocky is already earning widespread praise and early Oscar buzz, but Sylvester Stallone was initially baffled that anyone would want to watch a movie about his mission to make Rocky.
Directed by Green Book’s Peter Farrelly, I Play Rocky stars Anthony Ippolito as Stallone, a then-unknown actor who pushed to create himself the role of a lifetime. Despite lucrative offers to buy his script with the intent for an established name to star, Stallone refused to give up on this big opportunity and eventually won even bigger — between Rocky’s Best Picture victory, eight sequels and counting, and an iconic career.
“It is surreal because it isn’t as though you did something like climb Mount Everest,” Stallone tells Entertainment Weekly of first being presented with the prospect of I Play Rocky prospect. “It was an internal journey, this struggle, this rejection, and I thought, who could identify with that? Peter Farrelly goes, ‘This is a great story,’ and I said, ‘No, it’s not.’ He goes, ‘Sly, I like it better than the Rocky movie.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He goes, ‘Because this actually happened — that didn’t. The fact that you made this happen is really impossible and inspirational.’”
Stallone admits that today he would’ve “completely folded” if faced with the constant rejection, but it was the “insanity of youth” that allowed him to keep pushing, even as he was told, “Where do you get the balls to say you can star in a movie?”
“It’s really quite a lesson, and I don’t think there’s been an example for people of the younger generation to see that this s— can still happen, because it’s getting tougher to have magic happen,” Stallone shares. “Studios used to be run by guys who took a shot. Like, ‘This Dog Day Afternoon is kind of weird, but I wanna do it.’ Not today. Today, it’s all gears and wheels, and, ‘How tall is that guy? How many followers does he have?’ C’mon, it’s too clinical.”
Stallone isn’t officially involved with I Play Rocky, but when the first trailer dropped, he threw his weight behind the project, and his portrayer has called the icon’s support “really humbling.”
“It’s been 50 years since Rocky was released so you can’t help but feel nostalgic,” Ippolito recently told EW. “In a lot of ways, Stallone’s actual underdog story is just as compelling as the one he wrote. Hopefully it allows him to reminisce about some of these pivotal moments in his life.”
Stallone wrote and starred in six Rocky films, before Ryan Coogler revived the franchise with 2015’s Creed, which focused on Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), the son of Rocky’s late rival-turned-friend, Apollo (Carl Weathers). Stallone won a Golden Globe for his soulful performance as an older Rocky. He was last seen as the character in the final scene of 2018’s Creed II. While the Creed Universe has since continued with Creed III and an upcoming spinoff series, Stallone has his own idea for more Rocky.
“I think there’s a great opportunity to do a prequel starting at 16 years old,” Stallone reveals. “You meet Rocky’s father, his horrible mother, his half-brother. Because [the studio] took it out, a lot of people don’t realize that [the loan shark] Gazzo (Joe Spinell) was his half-brother, so they were raised together. And then you see Adrian (Talia Shire). He’s known Adrian and Paulie (Burt Young) for 10 years, and Mickey (Burgess Meredith) is 31 and a loser. So that would be great, because, again, for 16 and 17-year-olds, it’d be a great representation of their generation.”