How did a fishmonger who starred in an adult movie make Rocky? The film about Sylvester Stallone’s amazing triumph

Fifty years ago this December, cinema’s greatest underdog story hit the screen, a tale about a Philadelphia ham-and-egger who takes the world heavyweight boxing champ all the way to the final bell, losing the fight on a judge’s decision but winning the hearts of a nation. That film, of course, was Rocky. Its creation, famously, was no less remarkable an underdog story – one about an out-of-work character actor with the curious name of Sylvester Stallone who wrote his own boxing movie then managed to convince a studio not only to finance it, but also to cast him in the title role. He then went one further than the character he was playing by earning the top prize: a best picture Oscar.

If you thought, half a century on, Rocky’s punching power – its unerring ability to make heroes out of zeroes – has faded, think again. This, after all, is a movie franchise whose stirring qualities are enough to make thousands of people hurtle up all 72 of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps every year in homage to its plucky pugilist.

‘They told me not to get my hopes up’ …Anthony Ippolito. Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

And now Rocky has birthed a third great underdog story. This one is about a 27-year-old New Yorker who, through grit, persistence and a never-ending stream of unsolicited audition tapes, bags the role of a lifetime and propels himself into the Oscar running, alongside the likes of Tom Cruise, Matt Damon and John Malkovich. His name is Anthony Ippolito and he’s playing Sly Stallone himself in Peter Farrelly’s rousing, making-of movie I Play Rocky.

The role, which follows Stallone from his early struggles in New York to movie greatness in LA, is one Ippolito has been circling – like Ali or Tyson rounding their prey – for years, before the project even had a script. Such was his desperation to play Stallone, he started sending in self-taped performances of what he thought those making the film might be after, an experience that felt like “sending your work into the abyss – even more so when no one’s asking for your audition in the first place”.

It’s a process, Ippolito remembers with a wry smile, that could feel “a little discouraging”, particularly when film websites were tipping big names for the role – Superman David Corenswet, Jacob Elordi, even Timothée Chalamet. Ippolito recalls: “People around me said, ‘Don’t get your hopes up, they’re probably looking at bigger names. That’s Hollywood.’”

He would not be deterred, though, and his self-confidence was justified: according to Farrelly, Ippolito was the first person he and the film’s producers looked at for the part. And once they saw him there was no point in auditioning anyone else.

Speaking to Ippolito by video call from a hotel room in Rome, it’s not easy to discern immediately what made those producers so convinced of his Sly-ness. Granted, he doesn’t look dissimilar to Rocky-era Stallone – the square jaw and mop of dark hair are present and correct – but his features are softer, more boyband, and his voice is noticeably higher than Stallone’s bassy drawl. You’d be more likely to compare him to a young Al Pacino – fitting, as Ippolito played Pacino in another making-of project, The Offer, a TV series about the protracted creation of The Godfather.

Can you beat up a frozen side of beef? … Ippolito as Stallone in I Play Rocky. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

Yet the moment the opening credits of I Play Rocky roll, a remarkable transformation occurs. Ippolito’s voice drops an octave, and he affects that stuffy sinus-heavy delivery of Stallone’s. His eyes droop, his chin juts, his shoulders seem to grow rounder and he starts to move in that loping shuffle. He looks broader and more imposing, too – the result, Ippolito says, of a bulking-up regime that involved “a lot of eating, a lot of protein … it required an entire lifestyle shift”.

It’s a performance that could so easily lapse into lazy caricature – or even worse, punching down, given that Stallone’s drooping features and slurred speech are the result of forceps injury at birth. But Ippolito is so note perfect that even Stallone has been in touch to offer his approval. “He had a positive reaction and I’m very grateful – because this is, in a lot of ways, a love letter to what he persevered through.”

The film, Ippolito says, covers a “very dark, lonely time” in Stallone’s life, when he worked in a fishmonger’s and appeared in an adult movie to scrape together rent. What serious roles he did get tended to be bit parts as tough guys, cops or thugs. He was routinely belittled for his speech and looks – particularly by his domineering father, played by Matt Dillon in the film. But Stallone had a remarkable raw talent hidden under the surface. “There’s this incongruence,” Ippolito says. “People would mistake him for being, um, maybe not smart – just a strong, burly guy with this slur. And then he’s actually a brilliant writer. Burt Young [his Rocky co-star] called him ‘an orphan in life’ with ‘a big fire burning and no place to put it’. You can feel this great depth and intensity.”

‘Raw talent’ … Stallone as the plucky pugilist in Rocky (1976). Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

I Play Rocky doesn’t seem terribly preoccupied with these roiling internal dynamics – though that isn’t to its detriment. It’s not hard to see why crowds have chimed with the film, which turns Stallone’s story into part inspirational sports movie, part comedy caper. Farrelly has great fun in depicting the scrappy, seat-of-its-pants production of the original film, which couldn’t go a day over for risk of its studio shutting the whole thing down: scenes are rattled off in single, frenzied takes; Stallone limps through filming with a strained leg tendon, then a broken hand from punching a frozen side of beef in the film’s famous meat-locker scene; at one point, cast and crew have to squeeze into a walk-in freezer with their equipment to hide from a union rep threatening to take their filming permit away.

The most entertaining section, though, comes before Rocky has even been greenlit, when the film’s producers are trying desperately to convince Stallone to give up the title role in return for a life-changing sum of money. No matter how many zeroes are added, Sly stands firm: no starring role, no deal. This despite him having few career prospects and a heavily pregnant wife. It’s a remarkable act of brinkmanship – at one point, Stallone is forced to sell his own dog to make ends meet – but it proves successful.

Stallone turned down $300,000, the equivalent of almost $2m today. Would Ippolito have gone to such extremes? “I don’t know, it’s a lot of money,” he laughs “I don’t want to make myself sound spineless! But it’s certainly tempting. I guess that’s what makes it so incredible, maddening almost. I think there’s a certain naive quality. Like he was able to just, at a young age, almost not know the rules so he could break them.”

In another life, rather than playing an actor playing a boxer, Ippolito might have been a baseball player. At three years old, he was a pitching prodigy able to throw a ball at “40 miles per hour or something”, a talent that led him to appear on an episode of Ripley’s Believe it or Not!. For much of his childhood, playing baseball professionally was “the main goal”, and he carried on at a high level at college. “I learned a lot about acting inadvertently,” he says, “because there’s a ton of failure in that sport.”

By his late teens, he had started to take acting seriously. He began picking up walk-on parts in films: David Chase’s coming of age movie Not Fade Away, where he got to watch James Gandolfini from afar; Julianne Moore comedy-drama The English Teacher; and Adam Sandler vehicle Pixels, where he first understood the appeal of doing this thing full-time. “I was like, ‘Wow, these guys look like they’re really having fun at work.’ That stuck out.”

Ippolito as Al Pacino in The Offer. Photograph: Nicole Wilder/Paramount+

After college, his career moved up a gear: there was a main role in edgy Netflix high-school drama Grand Army, then his appearance as Pacino in The Offer. How does it feel to play not one but two of the most famous actors alive? “It’ll throw you, for sure. But it’s also an incredible opportunity to explore stuff. There’s almost a voyeuristic quality to it – like an infinity staircase.”

Now, with the success of I Play Rocky, Ippolito is finding himself among the big names, rather than impersonating them. He recently met Andrew Garfield and “is still recovering”. More encounters will surely come in awards season: his Stallone performance is being talked up for a best actor nomination, which would put him up against “people I’ve looked up to for the last 20 years”. Don’t count Anthony Ippolito out yet.