From a basement tape to Stallone: Anthony Ippolito leads I Play Rocky

Anthony Ippolito won the part of Sylvester Stallone with an audition filmed in his grandmother’s basement. He has now taken that performance to Switzerland for the European premiere of I Play Rocky.

The film is directed by Peter Farrelly and stars Ippolito as a young Stallone, according to Variety. It tells the story of Stallone’s refusal to sell his Rocky script unless he could play the lead himself, in a stand-off with United Artists.

He had no script. Ippolito had only read that a film about the making of Rocky was in the works when he shot a self-tape copying Rocky’s movement and posture, with no guidance from the production. Farrelly ended the casting search after watching it.

The history behind the drama is well documented. Producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler offered Stallone $300,000 for the script, which he turned down to stay in the starring role, Variety reports. Rocky then won three Oscars in 1976, including Best Picture ahead of Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men.

That original film led to five further Rocky pictures and a Creed franchise built around Apollo Creed. Stallone himself lives with partial facial paralysis, caused by a severed facial nerve when forceps were misused during his birth. It is part of the physicality Ippolito had to study.

This is Ippolito’s second turn as a Hollywood icon. He previously played Al Pacino in The Offer, the Paramount+ miniseries about the making of The Godfather. In I Play Rocky he stars alongside Stephan James, who said he was “blown away” by Ippolito’s transformation into Stallone, according to Entertainment Weekly.

Behind the camera, the picture comes from Amazon MGM Studios and is planned for theatres, as reported by Deadline. Ippolito signed with CAA in July 2026, following the first-look photo of him as the young Stallone released last October.

The rollout has followed the festival path. I Play Rocky premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, after footage was shown to cinema owners at CinemaCon in April and a first trailer arrived in July. It is scheduled for Thanksgiving 2026, the late-November holiday stretch in the United States that often hosts large family audiences, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

What makes this stand out for general viewers is the distance travelled. A basement tape with no lines to read became a starring role in a studio release about one of cinema’s most famous long shots.