At a New York event to promote his new memoir, the Rocky star admitted he had mixed feelings watching Anthony Ippolito play a young version of him before changing his mind entirely.
Sylvester Stallone has finally weighed in on watching his own origin story play out on screen, and his first reaction was less flattery, more mild alarm.
Speaking Monday at 92NY in New York while promoting his memoir The Steps, the 79-year-old actor admitted he was "kind of mixed" when he first heard about I Play Rocky, the biopic tracing the making of 1976's Rocky. "I'm going, 'I'm not dead yet. Aren't we jumping the gun a little bit?'" he told moderator Tracy Smith of CBS Sunday Morning.
That changed the moment he actually saw footage of Anthony Ippolito, who plays a young Stallone in the film. "I actually thought it was me the first moment," he said, describing how he called his daughter over to confirm what he was seeing. "That's unbelievable."
I Play Rocky, directed by Peter Farrelly, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month to strong buzz, chronicling the scrappy, near-impossible production of the original Rocky. Stallone was clear that he had no creative hand in the project itself. "I said, 'I'll just sit back and watch,'" he recalled. "I talked to the kid. I said, 'If you want any questions, here I am,' and that was it. But they did it all on their own."
Watching Ippolito's take on his younger self apparently came with a few jolts of self-recognition too. "I go, 'Do I talk like that? Now I get it. Now I get it,'" Stallone said, only half-joking.
An old grudge against Rocky V
The conversation drifted well beyond the biopic. Stallone reopened an old wound around 1990's Rocky V, a film he's called "a thorn in my side" for years, and confirmed he's currently trying to get Amazon on board for a recut. "It bothers me to death because I know I took my foot off the gas," he said, adding he wishes he'd directed it himself instead of easing up to please audiences. Managing expectations, he added that any recut "is not going to be great. It'll be acceptable."
Asked whether he could have broken into Hollywood if he were starting out today, Stallone wasn't optimistic. "It's a whole different ideology out there," he said, arguing that today's action cinema feels "kind of anachronistic" compared to when he came up. He used The Godfather as his example of a film he thinks couldn't get made now, saying a remake would ignore the social climate and casting realities that made the original work in its own moment.
None of that is stopping I Play Rocky from moving forward off its Toronto reception. A wide release date hasn't been confirmed yet, but with Farrelly's film already generating festival chatter and Stallone himself now publicly on board, distributor plans are expected to firm up in the coming weeks.
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