Sylvester Stallone on I Play Rocky: "I Have Zero to Do With It"
Last Saturday, September 12, I Play Rocky premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is a film about how Sylvester Stallone got Rocky made, directed by Peter Farrelly from a script by Peter Gamble, with Anthony Ippolito as the young Stallone. The man it is about learned it existed the way the rest of us did. He read about it.
That was in September 2025, shortly after Ippolito was cast, and Stallone said so in an interview with The Playlist. He said nobody had contacted him about it, though he was open to coming on as a consultant. Amazon MGM's trailer announcement names three producers: Toby Emmerich, Christian Baha and Farrelly himself. Stallone is not one of them.
The pitch is already a movie
Amazon sells the film like this: "Told 'no' at every turn, Sylvester Stallone bets everything on himself, holding the line on playing the lead against seemingly impossible odds." The record backs it up. After watching Muhammad Ali fight Chuck Wepner on March 24, 1975, Stallone wrote the screenplay in three and a half days. United Artists wanted an established star such as Robert Redford, Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds or James Caan. Stallone's agents insisted he play the title role, to the point of an ultimatum, and he got it. The film was made for about a million dollars.
Now read the premise of the film he wrote. A poor, small-time club fighter from Philadelphia, who collects debts for a loan shark, gets an unlikely shot at the heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed.
That is the story I Play Rocky tells, and Stallone put it on screen while it was happening to him. An unknown the studio would rather have replaced with Redford wrote himself a part about a nobody handed a shot he was never supposed to get, then played it with his own face. Rocky is the making-of, dressed as a boxing picture, and it has something no recreation can offer: the real thing, filmed in the moment, by the people who were in the room.
Rocky had its world premiere at the Paramount Theatre in New York on November 20, 1976, and won Best Picture, Best Director for John G. Avildsen and Best Film Editing. Stallone was nominated for Best Actor and for his screenplay, the third man in history to land both nominations for one film, after Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles. Talia Shire was nominated for Best Actress as Adrian, and Burgess Meredith and Burt Young for Best Supporting Actor. Bill Conti's "Gonna Fly Now" spent a week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1977, and the run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art was shot on Garrett Brown's new Steadicam.
The people who were there
Farrelly's film has a lot of real people to play, and several can no longer tell their side. Stephan James plays Carl Weathers, who died in February 2024 and who won the part of Apollo Creed after criticizing Stallone's acting at his audition, exactly the kind of scene a film like this exists for. Jay Duplass plays Avildsen, who died in 2017. Robert Morgan plays Meredith, who played Rocky's trainer Mickey and died in 1997. Matt Dillon plays Stallone's father, Frank Stallone Sr., and AnnaSophia Robb plays his first wife, Sasha Czack.
Stallone is still here, and he has already told this story on camera. Sly, Thom Zimny's 95-minute documentary about him, closed the same festival on September 16, 2023, and Netflix released it that November. It runs from a hard childhood in Manhattan through the struggling-actor years to action stardom, Rocky and Rambo included, and Shire is among the interviewees, alongside his brother Frank Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Quentin Tarantino. The chapter Farrelly dramatizes is one Stallone has already told in his own words, in Toronto, three years earlier.
Watch the 1976 film first
So here is the call: do not let I Play Rocky be your first telling of this story. It opens in limited release on Friday, November 6, and goes nationwide on Friday, November 20, 50 years to the day after Rocky's world premiere. Use the weeks in between. Watch Rocky first. Then watch Sly and hear it from the man who lived it. Then see what Farrelly and Ippolito made of it, and judge it as the third telling instead of the only one.
Farrelly is not a director to wave away. His Green Book won the audience award in Toronto in 2018 and went on to win Best Picture, the same prize Rocky took. But a film about a man who fought for the right to play his own story, made by a team that by his account never called him, has a question to answer on screen: what does it know that he has not already shown us? You will judge the answer better with the original fresh in your head.
The watch order, and the one to skip
If Rocky pulls you in, take the series in release order with one exception.
- Rocky II (1979) is the first Rocky that Stallone directed himself.
- Rocky III (1982) brings in Mr. T as Clubber Lang and puts Apollo in Rocky's corner.
- Rocky IV (1985) is the Cold War one, with Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago. Critics panned it on release and warmed to it later. Stallone's 2021 cut, Rocky IV: Rocky vs Drago, adds about 38 minutes of unreleased footage and reviewed far better.
- Skip Rocky V (1990). Avildsen came back to direct, and critics faulted its script, its characters and its medical inaccuracies. Stallone has said part of the reason he made the next one was to give the character a better send-off. Take him at his word and go from IV straight to Rocky Balboa.
- Rocky Balboa (2006), written and directed by Stallone, is that send-off, with Burt Young back as Paulie.
- Creed (2015) is where Ryan Coogler hands the story to Michael B. Jordan as Adonis, Apollo's son, who asks Rocky to train him. It won Stallone his first Golden Globe and a third Oscar nomination, for the same character that earned him his first.
- Creed II (2018), which Stallone co-wrote, brings the Drago family back.
- Creed III (2023), directed by Jordan, is the first film in the series without Stallone as Rocky. Watch it last, as the moment the story stops needing him.
For the Stallone who is not wearing gloves, two performances. In First Blood (1982), Ted Kotcheff's adaptation of David Morrell's 1972 novel, he plays John Rambo, a Vietnam War veteran, and shares the screenplay credit; it drew mixed reviews at first and has been reappraised since. In James Mangold's Cop Land (1997), he gained 40 pounds to play Freddy Heflin, a hearing-impaired sheriff in a New Jersey town overrun by corrupt New York cops, opposite Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta. Critics praised his performance, it won him Best Actor at the Stockholm International Film Festival, and it is the clearest proof that the man who wrote Rocky could still disappear into someone smaller than himself.
