Peter Farrelly unveiled his latest film, I Play Rocky, at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12. The biographical drama follows Sylvester Stallone’s difficult journey to write and star in the 1976 classic Rocky.
Peter Farrelly reveals how Sylvester Stallone reacted after watching I Play Rocky alone at home
Long before Rocky became a Hollywood classic, Stallone was a struggling actor who faced rejection from Hollywood and lived in poverty. When Stallone wrote the screenplay, he was offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to sell it. However, he refused to give up the story unless he could also play Rocky Balboa. While visiting Entertainment Weekly’s studio at TIFF, Farrelly shared that Stallone had seen the film.
“He loved it,” Farrelly said. “I was a little nervous, to be honest, because he was watching it alone at his house. And this movie, if you watch it with a crowd, you feel it, and I didn’t know how he would respond. But he called right after.” Anthony Ippolito plays young Stallone in I Play Rocky, showing how his real-life struggles were similar to Balboa’s journey from an underdog to a champion.
The director said Peter Gamble’s script made it “very easy” to get Stallone’s approval for the film. “It’s a great script, but I knew going in — I told Toby Emmerich, the producer — I said, ‘I want to do this movie, but I’m not doing it unless Stallone signs off on it.’ So he read it. We sat down and I told him to his face, ‘I’m not doing it unless you love it and want us to do it.’ He said, ‘I want you to do it,'” he explained. He added that the script was so good that he was confident Stallone would like it. The film is scheduled for a limited theatrical release across the U.S. on November 6.
