In the trailer for I Play Rocky, Anthony Ippolito plays Sylvester Stallone playing Rocky in and around, well, Rocky, the instant-classic 1976 film that put one of our greatest action stars on the map. Ippolito’s look for the film is right and the voice, described in the trailer (below) as sounding like “you’ve got rocks in your mouth,” is spot on — it does sound like Ippolito has rocks in his mouth! Stephan James is pretty pitch-perfect and photo realistic as Carl Weathers too.
If Ippolito looks familiar — and not just because he looks like Stallone (or even Jeremy Allen White dressed as Stallone) — it is probably because he’s the guy who played Al Pacino in Paramount limited series The Offer. Yes, Ippolito has become Hollywood’s go-to for portraying young, Italian, breakout movie stars in ’70s films.
I Play Rocky also stars Matt Dillon, AnnaSophia Robb, P.J. Byrne, Toby Kebbell, Tracy Letts, Jay Duplass and Kiki Seto, and is produced by Peter Farrelly, who also directs, as well as Christian Baha, Toby Emmerich and Paul Currie. The script hails from Peter Gamble, though there should probably be an honorable mention to the guy who wrote Rocky — that’d also be Stallone.
It is, after all, the Rocky screenplay that anchors the biopic. I Play Rocky tells the true story of “an unknown actor with an unshakable belief that he wasn’t just meant to write Rocky — he was meant to be Rocky Balboa,” the synopsis reads.
Stallone would end up being Balboa for five decades.
“Told ‘no’ at every turn, Sylvester Stallone bets everything on himself, holding the line on playing the lead against seemingly impossible odds,” the Amazon MGM Studios breakdown continues. “The result is the ultimate underdog story behind the ultimate underdog movie.”
It ain’t about how hard you hit — it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Sure, Rocky loses in the end, but Rocky was a big winner. Stallone was Oscar-nominated for the screenplay he purportedly wrote in like half a week. Rocky didn’t win that particular Academy Award — it went to Network — but it won best picture in a famously stacked year that also included Network, Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men in the category.
Moreover, Rocky‘s rocketship success birthed a major franchise. To-date, there are six Rocky films and three Creed spinoffs (with a fourth in development). Stallone wrote all of the Rocky movies and Creed II — the one that (spoiler alert) killed off his character.
Watch the trailer below.
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