“I Play Rocky” is all kinds of meta. In the new movie about the making of the beloved 1976 sports drama “Rocky,” art imitates life on as many levels as the Philadelphia Museum of Art has steps. Sure, it’s the story of how the then-struggling actor Sylvester Stallone wrote a script about a struggling boxer named Rocky Balboa — and insisted on starring in the film, despite his sparse credentials and the fact that producers were throwing increasing amounts of money at him to walk away.
But it could also be about Peter Gamble, the longtime ghostwriter who penned the screenplay for “I Play Rocky” eight years ago, yearning to get a script with his name actually on it made into a movie. Then there’s Anthony Ippolito, an actor so determined to play the young Stallone that he sent a self-taped audition to filmmakers before he even saw a script. And finally, there’s the director Peter Farrelly, no stranger to success after his 2019 best picture winner, “Green Book,” but still feeling the sting after his Academy win became tinged with controversy. Each, in some way or another, are like Rocky: underdogs fighting for a chance to be seen.
Well, we know how that first part turned out. “Rocky” was a commercial and critical knockout, grossing $225 million worldwide ($1.33 billion in today’s money), nabbing 10 Oscar nominations and winning three including best picture, and bringing instant fame for its star, a then-30-year-old Stallone.
The outlook for the movie-about-the-movie looks pretty rosy, too. “I Play Rocky” got an enthusiastic reception when it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and reviews have been mostly positive since, singling out both Ippolito’s transformative performance and the movie’s triumphant, crowd-pleasing tone.
Speaking two weeks before the Nov. 20 nationwide release of “I Play Rocky” and a few days after the midterm elections, Farrelly, 69, was giddy. “I don’t want to get into politics, but the last three days have been some of the happiest days of my life,” he said on a Zoom call from New York. “It gave me and a lot of people hope again. And this is a movie that gives you hope and inspires you.”
The journey began when Gamble, disheartened from years of ghostwriting and uncredited work in TV writers’ rooms, decided to create something of his own. “I’m sitting here struggling to take care of my family,” said Gamble, 52, who was teaching screenwriting at the University of Southern California at the time and “barely holding it together.” His manager suggested he write a biopic about Stallone.
It clicked immediately. “I knew I wanted to show how he was telling his story through the story of ‘Rocky,’” Gamble said. Too broke to buy books on the topic, he relied on internet research and wrote the screenplay in two weeks — not quite Stallone’s three-day turnaround for “Rocky,” but close enough. He sent it to Stallone and his producing partner, who passed on it. It then got picked up by another production company, where it sat for years.
Enter the producer Thomas Augsberger, who reached out to Gamble after the writers’ strike ended in 2023. “It was the first time I ever felt seen outside of a very small group,” Gamble said. Augsberger died suddenly a few months later, but he had passed the script on to Toby Emmerich’s producing partner, Michele Weiss. Emmerich then sent it to Farrelly, who wanted to make it into a movie — but not without Stallone’s blessing.
Luckily, Stallone, now 80, loved the script and agreed to meet Farrelly and Emmerich for lunch at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, Calif. “It felt like old Hollywood — we’re in the corner booth with Sylvester Stallone,” Farrelly recalled. “He said, ‘I approve.’” Stallone was not involved in the production, though; Farrelly warned him that audiences might think the film would, well, pull punches if the actor signed on as an executive producer. He kept his distance.
Still, Stallone was impressed by Ippolito, according to Farrelly: “He said, ‘He’s not acting. He’s becoming.’” Indeed, in a recent interview with “CBS Mornings,” Stallone said of his experience of watching the new film: “It was very surreal because at first I was going to be hypercritical. Like, that’s me. ‘I don’t walk like that.’ But I did walk like that. I did talk like that.”
As anyone who’s seen the countless impressions of Stallone knows, the line between embodiment and caricature can get tricky. When Ippolito, who at the time was best known for playing Al Pacino in the 2022 Paramount+ limited series “The Offer,” got wind of the film, he went down to his grandmother’s basement in Long Island, hung up a punching bag and improvised a scene that was inspired by the original “Rocky.”
“Nobody was asking me to audition,” said Ippolito, 26. “But I was excited about it, so I wanted to pull something together.” After that initial effort, the actor “kept taping and sending stuff” to the filmmakers. “I just did that until they were either going to say stop or wanted to talk more.”
Ippolito was the first and only person Farrelly saw for the role. The actor’s first tape “was already perfect,” the director said, “except he had to gain weight.” Once he got the part, Ippolito spent a year at the gym and put on more than 30 pounds. “He was so on it,” says his co-star AnnaSophia Robb, 32, who plays Stallone’s first wife, Sasha.
The rest of the cast came together in the meantime: Stephan James as Carl Weathers, who played Rocky’s rival Apollo Creed; Matt Dillon as Stallone’s combative father, Frank; Tracy Letts as a skeptical movie executive named Sandy Maddox; and Toby Kebbell and P.J. Byrne as the scrappy “Rocky” producers Bob Chartoff and Irwin Winkler.
“I thought it was terrific,” said Winkler, 95, of the film. The veteran producer even makes a cameo in “I Play Rocky” in a scene where Rocky has to sell his cherished bull mastiff, Butkus, to make ends meet. (In yet another meta twist, Farrelly, who sold his bulldog during the 1988 writers strike, adopted the dog who played Butkus in “I Play Rocky.”)
The movie ends with a title card touting the 10 Oscar nominations “Rocky” received. In real life, Stallone accepted the best picture prize onstage with Chartoff and Winkler, though over the course of the five sequels and “Creed” spinoff films that followed, Stallone and Winkler would famously fall out over ownership of the franchise. “How shall I put it?” said Winkler on whether he and Stallone had reconciled. “We really haven’t spoken. He does his television series, and I’m making the ‘Creed’ movies, and I’m very proud of the fact that we all got together to make ‘Creed.’”
In any case, Farrelly said “I Play Rocky” had already had a smoother ride than his last TIFF breakout. “It was painful,” he says about the backlash to “Green Book,” which won the festival’s People’s Choice Award before its successful Oscars run. But with his current film, he said, “people have never been nicer to me.”
Perhaps it’s because, like the film that inspired it, “I Play Rocky” is precisely what audiences need at the moment. “It’s a story about somebody who has integrity, right to the end, and it’s rare to see that today,” Farrelly said. “I hope people get lifted up.”
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