AnnaSophia Robb is back on the big screen this weekend in I Play Rocky, Peter Farrelly’s film about the making of Rocky, with Robb in the female lead as Sasha Czack, the first wife of Sylvester Stallone. The film opens Friday, November 6 in select theaters in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia, and reaches theaters everywhere on November 20.
It is the latest stop on a run that Trevor Decker News readers have followed through the film’s Los Angeles premiere at AFI Fest, its first clip and second trailer, and Wednesday night’s special screening in New York. It also continues a career that started in childhood and has quietly stacked up one memorable role after another.
Robb’s first starring role came at ten, as Samantha Parkington in the 2004 television movie Samantha: An American Girl Holiday. A year later she made her feature film debut in Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), playing Opal, a lonely girl in a small Florida town whose world opens up when she adopts a stray dog she finds in a grocery store. Adapted from Kate DiCamillo’s novel, the film put young Robb at the center of nearly every scene, and she carried it with a natural warmth that made it a lasting family favorite.
The same year, she played Violet Beauregarde, the competitive gum chewer who inflates into a blueberry, in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). The film was a major box office success around the world and introduced Robb to a far bigger audience. It was also the start of a pattern that would follow her for years, as one beloved children’s book after another landed in her hands.
Bridge to Terabithia (2007) was the next of those books, with Robb playing Leslie Burke, the imaginative new girl who builds a magical kingdom in the woods with her friend Jess. Robb gave the film its spark and much of its heart, and the performance earned her the Young Artist Award for Leading Young Actress.
Two years later she was back with Disney for Race to Witch Mountain (2009), playing Sara, a teenager with extraordinary powers on the run alongside her brother, with Dwayne Johnson as the cab driver pulled into their escape. Then, in Soul Surfer (2011), Robb took on a true story, playing surfer Bethany Hamilton, who lost her arm in a shark attack at thirteen and fought her way back to professional competition. It was demanding work, physical and emotional in equal measure, and it became one of the performances she is most closely identified with.
Television gave her a different kind of spotlight in The Carrie Diaries, The CW’s Sex and the City prequel, where she played a teenage Carrie Bradshaw across two seasons starting in 2013. Stepping into a character audiences already loved was a risk, and Robb made the younger Carrie her own, all big dreams and bigger hair.
Her adult work has leaned into prestige television, including a main role as Lacey Hutches in Hulu’s true crime drama The Act (2019) and a turn in Peacock’s Dr. Death (2021) as prosecutor Michelle Shughart, part of the team that brought a dangerous surgeon to justice.
Her film work reached a new gear in Rebel Ridge (2024), the Netflix thriller from director Jeremy Saulnier, where she plays Summer McBride, a court clerk who becomes the moral center of a small town corruption story opposite Aaron Pierre. The film was a streaming hit and a clear reminder of the range Robb has built since her child star days.
Which brings the story back to I Play Rocky. As Sasha Czack, opposite Anthony Ippolito as the young Stallone, Robb plays the woman who stood by him in the lean years, when he was a struggling actor refusing to sell his Rocky script unless he could star in it himself. More than twenty years after Opal, it is another performance built on warmth and resolve, and another reminder that Robb has been one of the most reliable performers of her generation since she was a kid. I Play Rocky opens in select theaters November 6 and in theaters everywhere November 20.