Opinion | The Young Actor Who Dared to Play Stallone — and the Underdog Spirit That Endures
Nearly fifty years after Rocky first staggered into theaters and into the cultural bloodstream, the story of Sylvester Stallone’s improbable rise is returning to the screen — this time not as a boxing match, but as a drama about belief, rejection, and persistence.
The upcoming biopic I Play Rocky, directed by Oscar-winner Peter Farrelly, has found its unlikely lead in Anthony Ippolito, a 25-year-old actor best known for portraying Al Pacino in the television series The Offer. Ippolito did not wait for a casting call; instead, he sent in an unsolicited audition tape, a bold gamble that mirrors the very story he now inherits — Stallone refusing to sell his script unless he himself could play the part.
There is something poetic, almost inevitable, about this symmetry. Stallone’s tale was never just about boxing. It was about the invisible battles behind closed doors — an unknown actor scribbling a screenplay in a fit of desperation, studios scoffing at his insistence to star, and the thin line between obscurity and cultural immortality.
That Rocky was made at all remains one of Hollywood’s great miracles. That it went on to win Best Picture, spawn a billion-dollar franchise, and etch Stallone’s name into cinema’s pantheon is nothing short of mythic. And yet, Stallone himself — now in his late 70s, still commanding streaming audiences in Tulsa King — embodies the very resilience he once scripted.
The decision to cast Ippolito is not without risk. Playing Stallone is no mere impersonation; it requires capturing a particular mix of vulnerability and brute determination, an awkward poetry in motion. But if I Play Rocky succeeds, it may remind us why audiences fell in love with the original in the first place: because the underdog spirit, once set loose, never really fades.
Half a century later, America still needs its Rockys — both in the ring and behind the camera.