Peter Farrelly has found the man who will play Sylvester Stallone in his upcoming biopic, I Play Rocky. It turns out, he did the smart thing and cast someone who could be Stallone’s clone, actor Anthony Ippolito. Never heard of him? That’s about to change.
THR reports Ippolito has been cast as Sylvester Stallone in Amazon MGM’s I Play Rocky, a film about Stallone’s making of the classic boxing drama that won ten Academy Awards in 1976. The film has a screenplay by Peter Gamble, and centers on “a struggling actor with a partially paralyzed face and a speech impediment writes a script that a big movie studio wants to buy, but he refuses to sell it unless he gets to play the lead. Turning down an offer of life-changing money, he instead works for pennies to get the movie made with himself in the starring role. The movie becomes the biggest box office hit of 1976, notching 10 Oscar nominations and winning Best Picture.”
So who is Ippolito? The 26-year-old played Al Pacino in the Paramount+ series The Offer. So from Pacino to Stallone, this guy is making his way by embodying some of the most prominent Italian-American actors of the era.
It’s still unclear whether Stallone himself has anything to do with this movie, but it sure doesn’t seem like it and that’s a shame. Stallone is already being cut out of the upcoming Rambo movie, just as he hasn’t been part of the Creed franchise lately.
