Anthony Ippolito is “grateful” to be cast as Sylvester Stallone in Peter Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky,” a rousing biopic centered on the making of 1976’s “Rocky” and premiering at Toronto Film Festival.
TORONTO − Of course, the movie about the making of “Rocky” is also an underdog “Rocky” tale.
At Toronto International Film Festival, newcomer Anthony Ippolito got a grand introduction to the cinema world – and perhaps the Oscar race – at the Sept. 12 world premiere of “I Play Rocky” (in select theaters Nov. 6). The 27-year-old New York native plays Sylvester Stallone in a biopic of sorts that follows Stallone as a struggling actor who couldn’t get a good part, so he wrote himself the lead role in the screenplay for “Rocky.”
When producers and the studio want to hire a name star, Stallone sticks to his guns (“I play Rocky,” he tells them over and over) and forces them to cast him as boxer Rocky Balboa. He then navigates a stressful albeit successful production on a low budget.
Being Stallone in the movie “took a lot of effort,” Ippolito acknowledges in a post-premiere Q&A after a standing ovation, and he’s “grateful” that director Peter Farrelly and others “were willing to take a chance on me. The movie shows it’s not easy to be an actor sometimes and this is absolutely surreal.”
Farrelly thought Peter Gamble’s “I Play Rocky” was “the greatest script I’d ever read. Then a series of incredible things happened,” the filmmaker said.
He was about to start a worldwide search to find the actor to play Stallone, and Farrelly’s casting agent called him one day and said, “I’ve got Stallone.”
“I was like, ‘What are you talking about? We haven’t even begun,’ ” Farrelly recalls. “He goes, ‘Some kid sent me a tape.’ ”
Ippolito had heard about the movie, somehow got his hands on the script, and self-recorded three scenes in his grandmother’s basement. “I looked at it and I was like, ‘This search is over. This is the guy,’ ” the director said. “It was an amazing thing.”
“I Play Rocky” re-creates many scenes from the 1976 “Rocky” movie, with Stephan James as Carl Weathers (who played rival boxer Apollo Creed) and Kiki Seto as Talia Shire (who starred as Rocky’s future wife, Adrian). Seto says doing a new version of the iconic “Rocky” moments were the most fun: “We had to move mechanically backward and understand what is their voice, what is their accent, what is their movement. Kind of be a little bit robotic and then bring in the life of the character.”
The premiere was a homecoming for James, who was born and raised in Toronto. “I’m so honored to be able to carry the legacy of someone like Carl,” he said. “Not only was he such an important figure to the ‘Rocky’ franchise but just as a Black leading action hero pioneer. All of those things mean to so much to me stepping into his shoes and hopefully I do him just a little bit of justice.”
The huge crowd response from the premiere audience is a good sign that “I Play Rocky,” like its namesake, could be an Oscar contender. (The original “Rocky” scored 10 nominations at the 1977 Academy Awards and won three, including best picture.) Already, Farrelly has scored a rave review from an important critic: “Yeah, Sly liked it.”