At first, Sylvester Stallone didn’t know what to think about I Play Rocky, the Peter Farrelly-helmed biopic about Stallone’s formative trials and triumphs during the making of the 1976 underdog boxing drama Rocky. “I’m not dead yet,” Stallone recalls thinking to himself during a promotional interview for his memoir, The Steps, conducted at 92NY this past September: “Aren’t we jumping the gun a little bit?” But the Italian Stallion says he changed his mind after he watched a video of newcomer Anthony Ippolito in character as a young Stallone: “I actually thought it was me the first moment.” The real Stallone was quick to add that he didn’t work with the makers of I Play Rocky, and his initial discomfort with the project is still revealing for a man who’s spent so much time curating his public image.
I Play Rocky is essentially an authorized biography that Stallone doesn’t have full authorial control over. That’s especially striking given his history of either writing or rewriting his scripts to better suit what he thinks the American public wants from him. Stallone continues this tradition in both his memoir and in recent interviews where he commits to a selective revisionism that either conveniently omits or re-presents certain details of his well-reported career, like his messy feuding with Rocky producer Irwin Winkler, whom Stallone described as “remarkably untalented and parasitical.”
That protest is unfortunately part of Stallone’s legacy, given that he’s repeatedly said that he regrets co-starring with Michael B. Jordan in the Winkler-produced Creed. And as Stallone does interviews to promote The Steps—and enjoys considerable praise from the makers of I Play Rocky during their own press tour—Stallone’s fans are invited to revisit his past by casting the self-mythologized working class hero in a softer light.
Stallone’s bowdlerized anecdotes indirectly draw attention to the humanizing details that we lose out on when we let artists rewrite their own history or, in the case of I Play Rocky, allow a “love letter” (in Ippolito’s words) to ostensibly separate fact from fiction, as Farrelly says he hoped to do: “I can’t speak for Stallone whether he was aware of it, but I, for some reason, always imagined he was not aware of how he was basically writing his life […] Rocky‘s fiction, Stallone’s a real person. That’s what struck me as, ‘This is worth doing.'”
For starters, in The Steps, Stallone conspicuously leaves out one of the funniest details about the time he worked on Rocky‘s script while gigging as a movie usher at Manhattan’s long-gone Baronet And Coronet Theater. Stallone talks about this ignoble part-time job like it was an informal filmmaking education and further proof that he was always a salt-of-the-earth maverick autodidact. “Most film schools teach a bunch of repetitive theory, or well-worn film history, or how films were made in Europe in the twenties,” Stallone writes. “Nothing useful for someone like me. They don’t teach anything close to explaining why a movie works or doesn’t. This job was a true chance to learn filmmaking in a way that made sense to me.”
Stallone does not, however, repeat the story about how he got fired from the Baronet for trying to scalp tickets: For an additional fee, Stallone offered to show already paying customers the best seats in the house. He eventually picked on the wrong customer: Walter Reade Jr., the Baronet’s owner.
Stallone’s ousting is also noteworthy because Winkler screened Rocky at the Baronet for some United Artists studio executives, as well as a pair of exhibitors, Loew’s theater chain owner Bernie Myerson and independent theater owner Don Rugoff. In A Life In The Movies: 50 Years Of Hollywood Stories, Winkler says that Rocky only got booked in a few theaters (and with no advertising) because of Myerson and Rugoff’s post-Baronet screening feedback.
Stallone’s wounded pride dictates a lot of what does and what doesn’t make the cut in his recent interviews. He says he doesn’t want to talk about his politics, but agrees with The New YorkTimes‘ Lulu Garcia-Navarro when she says that the public is mistaken for assuming that he’s politically conservative. He blames himself for being naive: “Sometimes you say things that you don’t realize the long-range effects [of].”
But then neither Stallone nor Garcia-Navarro talk about why people make assumptions about his politics, like when he received a Kennedy Center Honor last year or called Donald Trump the “second George Washington” in a November 2024 speech at Mar-a-Lago. Stallone even compared Trump to Rocky, because they’re apparently both self-made “mythical” characters: “I love mythology. This individual [Trump] does not exist on this planet. Nobody could have pulled off what he pulled off, so I’m in awe.”
Stallone has been trying to assume greater control of his narrative even before Rocky came out. He was a drama major at the University Of Miami, where he’d try to audition for various roles by reading from his own play, The Bald Rhinoceros, a Theater Of The Absurd-style combo of two favorite Eugene Ionesco plays, The Bald Soprano and Rhinoceros. For better and worse, the university faculty wouldn’t let Stallone read from his own early work.
In The Steps, Stallone mentions his love of avant-garde plays in passing and mostly in a derisive, offhand way, since his early love of Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet didn’t jumpstart his career. It’s a shame that he doesn’t mention other early dead ends that hint at his industriousness and eccentric sense of humor, like his unproduced script for Sad Blues, a character study about a singer with a heart condition who needs to eat bananas in order to survive.
Stallone was clearly inspired by frustrated artists, a theme in a couple of other unproduced early scripts, like Till Young Men Exist, about a group of theater students who take a Hollywood producer hostage and then blow him up using a combination of Fizzies tablets and Kool-Aid. If nothing else, that early theme might explain why Stallone has been talking about making an Edgar Allan Poe biopic since at least 1986, when Stallone was at the height of his cultural dominance following 1985’s box office one-two punch of Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rocky IV. It could also give a little non-hagiographic boost to Stallone’s oft-repeated stories about writing Rocky, his major breakthrough, and then later when he and Winkler told United Artists that he needed to star in the movie.
Pressuring the studio into casting a then-unknown actor as Rocky was pretty risky, as both Stallone and Winkler remind us in their respective autobiographies. Winkler and co-producer Robert Chartoff committed to letting Stallone star though and, in a 1983 interview for The Hollywood Reporter, Winkler shared that both he and his partner put up their houses as collateral in case Rocky flopped. That detail’s surprisingly not in either Stallone or Winkler’s memoirs, though Winkler does write about how he and Chartoff used the terms of their UA contract to get Rocky made on a budget of $1 million (they promised to pay for anything beyond that).
Winkler and his partner’s sacrifices appear newly relevant given that, in I Play Rocky, UA executive Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts) gives the filmmakers an ultimatum: If Rocky‘s production goes over budget, he’ll assume control and recast Stallone. Now the story about casting Rocky boils down only to Stallone’s admirable tenacity, since he held out when the studio tried to cast a bigger star instead—other suggested leading men include James Caan, Ryan O’Neal, and Burt Reynolds—despite being broke at the time, and with a pregnant wife to boot.
Stallone’s drive to be recognized as the author of his most successful material also predates Rocky, like when he received a co-writer credit for Lords Of Flatbush after Time praised a scene that Stallone scripted. Later, Stallone re-wrote half of James Cameron’s screenplay for Rambo: First Blood II, which mainly stands out since Stallone told Garcia-Navarro that the franchise’s sequels made a “cartoon” of the character. At the same time, though, Stallone notably has co-writer credits on all three successive follow-ups, including Rambo: Last Blood, in which Stallone’s disillusioned vet John Rambo just happens to play into President Trump’s racist “Build The Wall” rhetoric by killing a bunch of murderous cartel members.
At least Stallone’s consistent in blaming himself for how Rambo became a caricature of what he was. That doesn’t change the fact that Stallone’s been claiming that both he and Rambo are politically neutral since 1985, when he scoffed at being labeled “the Jane Fonda of the right.” “I’m not right wing,” Stallone said. “I’m not left wing. I love my country. I stand for ordinary Americans, losers a lot of them. They don’t understand big, international politics.” Stallone’s ignorance of foreign affairs did not, however, lead him to denounce Reagan when the president cited Rambo as a role model for handling hostage negotiations after 735 Lebanese and Palestinian citizens were kidnapped in Beirut: “Boy, I saw ‘Rambo‘ last night. I know what to do the next time this happens.”
It’s hard to have faith in a star or the makers of a star-chasing biopic if they’re both more concerned with redirecting fans to a homogenized version of the past than in painting a fuller picture of the artist as a fallible, human-scaled individual. Stallone’s self-effacing shtick may be endearing, but he’s an unreliable narrator of his life story. For example, it’s disappointing to see him only now praising his stripped-down, against-type performance as an out-of-shape police officer in James Mangold’s Cop Land. Stallone did, admittedly, share effusive gratitude for that role when it premiered at Cannes, when he apologized profusely for the “random, senseless violence” that defined his preceding roles: “I despise the last 10 years.”
At the same time, Cop Land‘s only mentioned once in Stallone’s memoir, and it’s in a parenthetical about how much money he got paid to make the movie (less than average). Stallone’s also often referred to Cop Land as a flop. “I was told these studios feel as though you’re not what you were,” Stallone said. “Time has passed. Your genre is over. For almost a decade, I couldn’t find work.” Nobody expects Stallone to be honest enough to admit that his pre-Cop Land career was already on the skids following a string of box office duds. But knowing that Cop Land wasn’t the pivot Stallone needed it to be helps to explain why he’s leaned so hard into reviving his two most successful characters, Rambo and Rocky.
It also might give I Play Rocky viewers additional perspective to know that Stallone only criticized Winkler and his sons after he failed to sell a Rocky prequel series to Prime Video. Stallone blamed Winkler specifically for holding up more Rocky movies: “If it wasn’t for Winkler there would’ve been at least another three Rocky’s [sic], that would’ve been wonderful.”
The unfortunate truth is that while the first Rocky embodies an idealized version of Stallone’s underdog persona, the actor has not been an underdog in decades. Projects like The Steps and I Play Rocky are tempting fan service, but they’re both hyper-mediated legends that merely reify their flawed subject. Those truly versed in Stallone’s career know that trying to rewrite history doesn’t erase its complexities.
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