Anthony Ippolito on His ‘I Play Rocky’ Big Break

The sound of rubber sneakers screeching against hard floor inundates the corridors of a sports center tucked in the suburbs of Zurich. It is then cut by the thudding of a heavy metal door. Tucked in the corner of a four-by-four boxing ring is Anthony Ippolito, wearing a thick cream pullover, a neatly pressed shirt with edges as sharp as his jawline and impeccably fitted brown slacks. It’s a look that stands in contrast to the pictures of sweaty, shirtless boxers that hang on the walls. The dark-haired star just landed in Switzerland, where he is to present the European premiere of Peter Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky.”

In a way, the movie about a movie could also be called “I Play Sylvester.” When Ippolito first read a news article about producers working on a film about the making of “Rocky,” he did not wait for a call. He hung a heavy punching bag in his grandma’s basement and, without a script or any guidance, shot a self-tape he felt emulated the physicality of the iconic boxer. When he saw the tape, Farrelly ended the casting process before it had even begun.

It’s easy to understand the “Green Book” director’s reaction: Ippolito is almost a dead ringer for Stallone. He shares the actor’s Italian roots, his jet-black hair and soulful eyes. Ippolito also carefully worked on the actor’s signature drawl, a consequence of Stallone’s partial facial paralysis, caused by a severed facial nerve through the accidental misuse of forceps during his birth. When the actor enters the screen on the very first frame of “I Play Rocky,” the audience needs no convincing. They are in.

As we both leave the boxing ring, Ippolito is kind about my wobbling between the thick white ropes. “I had never stepped through the ropes before,” I tell him. “It’s cool, isn’t it?” he responds. “It’s bringing back memories.”

When I ask if he remembers the first time he walked into a ring, he immediately says yes. “It was for this movie,” he laughs. “You saw how you have to do the thing with the rope, so that was a learning curve. That was fun.” Did he feel the sense of mythology about the ring? “I actually did, yeah. It kind of feels like you’re in the Colosseum.”

“I Play Rocky” chronicles how Stallone held his ground against United Artists to star in “Rocky,” a script he penned himself and that was partially inspired by his own underdog story. In the mid-70s, Stallone was a struggling actor, only landing gigs in shady erotic movies and dodging ever-piling bills, made even more pressing by the upcoming arrival of his first child. When veteran producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler offer him a check for $300,000, around $2 million today when adjusted for inflation, the young dreamer says no. He plays Rocky. The rest, as they say, is history.

“Rocky” would, of course, go on to become a major success, landing three Oscars in 1976 and beating “Taxi Driver” and “All the President’s Men” for Best Picture. The original film spanned another five “Rocky” instalments, and a “Creed” franchise inspired by Rocky Balboa’s famed rival, Apollo Creed. “He’s been around pretty much my entire childhood,” says Ippolito of Stallone.

Before sending in his self-tape, Ippolito had already had a first experience of playing an iconic actor—and their most iconic character, in turn—on the screen. He was Al Pacino in Paramount+’s miniseries “The Offer,” which told the story of the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal “The Godfather.”

“It was a baptism by fire,” says Ippolito when asked if having played Pacino helped him find the confidence to tackle another screen legend. “It did help, because, conceptually at least, you immediately understand that the goal is to try to strip down the icon part of it, the celebrity part of it, and look at the man. It’s the same task here, but also very different because they are very different men.”

To him, both roles “felt very weighty,” but taking on a lead role in “I Play Rocky” was “a bit more overwhelming.” “Especially understanding what these movies, this franchise has meant to so many people. You can’t help but take that into account. You try not to spend too much time thinking about that part of it, but it is definitely something that is in your head through the preparation process.”

Ippolito had a year and a half to prepare for the role, ferociously consuming anything he could find on Stallone while tackling the gruelling physical preparation that led him to put on 40 pounds of muscle he never had before. The most helpful thing, however, was having access to Stallone himself. The “Rambo” star, who is not officially attached to the film in any capacity, gave Ippolito a precious gift: time. The two had lengthy Zoom sessions, where Stallone spoke in depth about those vulnerable years before he broke into the industry.

“Having been able to speak to him after doing over a year of research was really kind of overwhelming, obviously, because at this point it’s become this massive thing to me,” says Ippolito. “What was really interesting and stuck out to me was hearing the parallels between ‘Rocky’ being an underdog in the story that he wrote and him being an underdog in his own life.”

“When he was communicating to me about his facial paralysis, how that kind of made him an outsider and the hardships that you go through when you’re trying to succeed as an actor with an issue like that…” He pauses for a moment. “Hearing that directly from him was really impactful.”

This understanding of Stallone’s pained journey toward becoming a star imbues Ippolito’s performance with much-needed empathy. While many have been quick to cruelly mock Stallone’s drawl over the last five decades, the young actor wanted to embody what makes the “The Expendables” star unique without resorting to cheap mimicry.

“Looking at it from the perspective of breaking it down as a character, these things he was dealing with are so integral to what he was going through in his own life,” he notes. “You start to see how idiosyncratic and how specific this man is. It’s part of what made ‘Rocky’ so special, because there was a time when the producers were trying to put all these other actors in that spot. Would we still be talking about this movie 50 years later if they had? Who knows. Maybe not.”

Once he figured out the drawl, he needed to figure out the physicality. “I Play Rocky” features surprisingly few boxing scenes for a film about “Rocky,” but much of Ippolito’s performance still relies on a deep grasp of how Stallone moves—from curling into himself at the sight of a pretty cinema usher, to the side-to-side slant of his upward running. Ippolito felt the physicality of fighting, and that of simply being were “pretty closely linked.”

“As you gain that sort of weight, and I had never gained that weight before, you start to understand your body a bit differently,” he points out. “I was simultaneously doing all this research on Stallone, watching any footage I could get, and certain things started to click into place naturally.”

Being on set with a great team also helped, he says. Costume designer Amy Roth watched hours and hours of footage of a young Stallone to nail the feel of his wardrobe, while production designer Anthony Gasparro meticulously recreated the sets from the 1976 movie. “As an actor, you hope that the people working on the project with you are as meticulous and detail-oriented as you’d like to be in your approach, and they all help each other.”

The long preparation time allowed the actor to not only get into physical shape, but also get himself mentally ready for the challenge he was about to tackle. “You only have one chance to do this,” he says, turning slightly more serious for a moment. “Film is forever, so you want to do your best with the opportunity. I felt it was a good thing that I had the extra time.”

Alas, while Ippolito felt mentally settled to be on set, nothing could quite have prepared him for the avalanche that is having a film of such visibility come into the world. The “I Play Rocky” world premiere in Toronto kicked off the film’s journey with a bang, with Variety’s Owen Gleiberman calling it “a cleverly crafted crowd-pleaser” and saying its star “gets it just right.”

Every time I pay Ippolito a compliment, big or small, he turns his gaze downwards and says a hearty thank you, the Stallone drawl still tugging in his voice. It’s easy to get a sense of how much it means to him for someone to connect with his performance, but also how overwhelming it is to have the film become a public thing after two years of inhabiting a tight filmmaking cocoon.

“It’s been… a lot,” he says, with a pointed pause. “You don’t really think about this part of it, to be honest with you. All that preparation and making the movie with the incredible ensemble that we had, you’re not even thinking about the idea that this is going to become a real thing to a bunch of other people. That’s part of what made it so special. It felt so personal, and I felt so close to everybody on set. Now, hopefully, people have their own personal connection to the story. It’s incredible.”

Playing an Oscar-winning icon in a film directed by an Oscar-winner about the making of an Oscar-winning film has predictably catapulted Ippolito into the Oscar conversation. When I bring the subject up, the young performer is promptly courteous but never dismissive: “There are so many foreign things to me unfolding so quickly. It’s a lot to take in.”

“I think it’s just really good that people are having a very positive response to the movie,” he goes on. “As it relates to awards season, hopefully that gives more encouragement for people to go see the movie. That is the goal: to have as many people as possible have a relationship with this movie.”

Seeing the success of the movie so far, how does he feel about having taken the gamble and sent the self-tape to Farrelly? “I’m pretty, pretty happy about it,” he says with a grin, before taking a moment to add one “very, very important thing.”

“There was a time when this didn’t seem so perfect,” he says. “It was once kind of like a singular idea in the shadows. Getting a part like this is very uncommon, and this situation is very unique. There were a lot of reasons to make it feel like it wasn’t possible. To see that it was is really something. So, yeah, I’m pretty happy.”

“I Play Rocky” opens in a limited theatrical release in the U.S. on Nov. 6, before expanding nationwide on Nov. 20 via Amazon MGM Studios.