The first trailer for I Play Rocky offers a dramatized look at one of Hollywood’s most enduring underdog stories, with Anthony Ippolito portraying a young Sylvester Stallone as he battles to make ‘Rocky’ on his own terms.
Directed by Academy Award winner Peter Farrelly from a screenplay by Peter Gamble, the Amazon MGM Studios film chronicles Stallone’s determination to star in the screenplay he wrote despite repeated pressure from studios to cast a more established actor.
The trailer follows Stallone through the difficult period before his breakthrough, showing him rejecting lucrative offers to sell the script unless he could portray boxer Rocky Balboa himself. That gamble ultimately led to the release of Rocky in 1976, a critical and commercial triumph that won the Academy Award for Best Picture and launched one of cinema’s most successful sports franchises. The film also highlights the real-life parallels between Stallone’s own struggles and the perseverance embodied by his famous fictional fighter.
Joining Ippolito is AnnaSophia Robb as Stallone’s first wife, Sasha Czack, with Stephan James portraying Carl Weathers, Matt Dillon playing Frank Stallone Sr., Jay Duplass as director John G. Avildsen, and P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell portraying producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff. The ensemble also includes Tracy Letts, Kiki Seto, Robert Morgan, Saul Stein and Trevor St. John. Ippolito, whose previous credits include portraying Al Pacino in The Offer, was cast after an unsolicited audition, a story that mirrors the film’s underdog theme.
I Play Rocky is scheduled to debut in select theaters in November before expanding nationwide around the 50th anniversary of Rocky’s original 1976 release.
See the trailer for I Play Rocky: HERE.
Editorial credit: Sean Pavone / Shutterstock.com