Amazon MGM Studios has released the first official clip from I Play Rocky, and it puts Anthony Ippolito front and center as a young Sylvester Stallone. The clip, titled “There’s Only One Sylvester,” is the first footage from Peter Farrelly’s telling of the true story behind Rocky.
Its subject is Stallone in the years before anyone knew his name, a struggling actor who had written the Rocky script and was certain of one thing: the story only worked with him in the lead. Buyers wanted the script without him, and he refused to let it go, betting everything on himself rather than handing Balboa to an established star. It is the underdog story behind the most famous underdog movie ever made.
Farrelly, an Academy Award winner, directs from a script by Peter Gamble. The cast around Ippolito includes AnnaSophia Robb, Toby Kebbell, P.J. Byrne, Jay Duplass and Kiki Seto, featuring Matt Dillon, with Stephan James and Tracy Letts.
Stallone, for his part, has been candid this week about what playing those roles cost him physically. In a new interview with Fox News Digital, covered by Variety, he said he has “millions, millions of regrets” about the decades he spent doing his own stunts, and called himself an idiot for it. “I could literally spend a half hour talking about injuries,” he said, counting nine back operations and three neck fusions after The Expendables, both shoulders ripped out and damage to an eye among them. “It’s been brutal,” he added, saying he has never been quite the same since the surgeries.
I Play Rocky opens in select theaters November 6 and expands to theaters everywhere later in November.