Awards Circuit Podcast: The season premiere kicks off with the star of Peter Farrelly's new film about the making of "Rocky" The first time you hear Anthony Ippolito’s voice in the trailer for “I Play Rocky,” you can’t help but gasp. The unmistakable Sylvester Stallone drawl is there, but something harder to convey than an impression is, too: the hunger of a young man Hollywood didn’t believe in yet. Ippolito knows that feeling better than most.
When he learned that Peter Farrelly was making a film about an unknown Stallone who willed his screenplay “Rocky” into existence, he also heard that bigger names were circling the part. Some people told him not to bother. Instead, he hung a heavy bag from a wooden beam in his grandmother’s basement, a room he says is “very much stuck in the ’70s,” pulled on vintage boxing gloves and shot an audition tape with no script and no invitation.
On this episode of the Variety Awards Circuit Podcast, Ippolito discusses landing the leading role in the making of a legend, getting his start in the business, and his thoughts on a changing Hollywood. It’s a fitting origin story for a film about a man who turned down life-changing money rather than let anyone else play the character he wrote. The Amazon MGM Studios release, written by Peter Gamble and directed by Farrelly, finished as first runner-up for the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In a sense, Ippolito has been preparing since he was 3, when neighbors noticed he was “oddly good at baseball.” The novelty landed him on the local news and the TV series “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!,” and a commercial agent suggested his mother start a college fund. Later credits include the Adam Sandler film “Pixels,” the Netflix drama series “Grand Army” and the Paramount+ limited series “The Offer,” in which he played Al Pacino. His work on Stallone bordered on obsession.
He listened to every scrap of footage he could find, including “Rebel,” an early Stallone film he ordered from a Japanese website and waited two months to receive. He studied the handwritten first draft of “Rocky,” scrawled in a red Mead notebook. He spent nearly two years bulking up from about 150 pounds to roughly 180 while training at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn.
Yes, he drank the raw eggs. What stays with me is how Ippolito reads this moment. With AI-generated performers entering the conversation, he argues that actors “have to be humanists” and that the image of a young writer drafting his future longhand with a Bic pen has never felt more urgent.
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