It’s kind of integral – if you’re making a film called I Play Rocky, about Sylvester Stallone penning and starring in the legendary sports movie, you
It’s kind of integral – if you’re making a film called I Play Rocky, about Sylvester Stallone penning and starring in the legendary sports movie, you need someone to play not just Rocky, but Sly himself (as he, you know, plays Rocky). And the one who bagged the role in Peter Farrelly’s drama is Anthony Ippolito – the 27-year-old New Yorker who is no stranger to playing screen legends, having portrayed a juvenile Al Pacino in Godfather making-of drama The Offer.
As soon as he found out the part of Sylvester Stallone was coming up, Ippolito got himself ring-ready. “I read a Deadline article about the movie and I couldn’t get it out of my head,” he tells Empire. “So I took it upon myself to get a director friend of mine and one of my cousins and put something on tape. My grandmother’s basement on Long Island is very much stuck in the ‘70s, so I thought it was the perfect place to do it.”
His fight to bag the part was a success – and when it came time to do his Stallone research, he went much deeper than the Rocky saga, also digging into some of the actor’s earliest work. “There was a great film he did in the early 1970s called Rebel, which I found on a Japanese website,” he says – a political drama (aka No Place To Hide) in which Stallone plays anti-war student agitator Jerry Savage. “It took a month-and-a-half to get to my house,” says Ippolito. Well, it’ll be worth it if someone decides to make ‘I Play Jerry Savage’.
Read Empire’s full I Play Rocky story in the Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew issue, on sale Thursday September 24. Pre-order a copy online here.. I Play Rocky comes to UK cinemas from November 6.
