I Play Rocky director Peter Farrelly didn’t know Anthony Ippolito had already played Al Pacino when he cast him as Sylvester Stallone. But it didn’t matter.
“I didn’t care if he’d done anything else,” Farrelly says. “If this was the first thing he was ever doing, I was fine with it. He was perfect.”
Ippolito, a Long Island native, got his first screen credit as a child for playing a young boy on a subway in the 2006 drama Bella. Other roles included the Adam Sandler sci-fi comedy Pixels in 2015, and the Netflix romantic drama Purple Hearts in 2022.
He earned a new level of attention for The Offer, the Paramount+ series about the making of The Godfather, in which he played a young Pacino.
But the attention for that project pales in comparison to the Oscar buzz he’s earned for Farrelly’s I Play Rocky, in which Ippolito plays a very hungry Stallone during the period when he was an actor and screenwriter insistent on playing Rocky Balboa in his script about the underdog Philadelphia boxer.
“This has been very overwhelming,” Ippolito says. “I’m very grateful, and I’m trying to stay in a place of gratitude. It feels like a whirlwind, but I’m trying to take it in a day at a time.”
Ippolito loves disappearing into a role: “That’s kind of the goal,”he says. He loved I Play Rocky because the film is its own kind of underdog story.
“Stallone endured the same type of beating, just not in a boxing ring,” Ippolito says. “He endured it through his father and through his life and through the outside world judging him. And so the idea that he was able to overcome so much has absolutely been inspiring for me.”
Stallone has explained that he had nothing to do with I Play Rocky. But he was still impressed by Ippolito.
The icon said at a recent 92nd Street Y talk to promote his new memoir, The Steps, that when he first saw footage of Ippolito, “I actually thought it was me, the first moment.”
Anthony Ippolito on Hollywood’s ‘Renasissance Period’
Ippolito says one of the unforeseen benefits of playing Pacino and Stallone in ’70s classics is that his research sent him deep into the films of the decade, which he describes as “an incredible kind of renaissance period” for moviemaking.
“I just fell in love with so many films that were made during that period of time,” he says. “There’s a place for that type of stuff nowadays as well, and really grounded, character-driven storytelling. I’m excited to see what comes next.”
And for all the Pacino and Stallone comparisons, Farrelly sees his 27-year-old more like a couple of other actors who were also stars of the ’70s and subsequent decades.
“His performance reminds me a lot of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever,” Farrelly says. “He’s got the same kind of reality that Travolta had, and that’s one of my all-time favorite movies.”
Farrelly also loves Ippolito’s versatility, predicting: “He’s going to be like a Dustin Hoffman type who can do a million things.”
I Play Rocky arrives in theaters Friday, from Amazon MGM Studios.
Main image: I Play Rocky star Anthony Ippolito photo by Macrae Marran.
