Anthony Ippolito and the I Play Rocky Cast Light Up the NYC Premiere — and the Oscar Buzz Is Real

There are premieres, and then there are premieres that feel like the start of something. On Wednesday night, the SVA Theatre in New York City hosted the second kind. Anthony Ippolito walked the red carpet for I Play Rocky, the new film about how Sylvester Stallone willed Rocky Balboa into existence, and if the early reviews are anything to go by, Ippolito didn’t just show up — he arrived.

He wasn’t alone. AnnaSophia Robb and Stephan James, his co-stars in the film, joined him on the carpet, along with Matt Dillon, PJ Byrne, Toby Kebbell, Tracy Letts, Saul Stein and Scot Teller. Director Peter Farrelly was there too, posing with his cast the night before the movie opens in theaters on Friday, November 6.

It’s a fitting setting for this particular story. I Play Rocky is, at its core, a movie about a New York nobody who refused to take no for an answer. Fifty years after Stallone did exactly that in real life, the film about him got its big New York moment — and the people who made it looked like they knew it.

A star is born — again

The buzz around this one has been building since the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, and the critics haven’t exactly been shy. Variety’s review put it about as plainly as a review can: “Make no mistake: a star is born. Ippolito delivers the kind of breakout that turns a working actor into a name overnight, anchoring one of the truest underdog stories the business has ever told.”

That’s a big swing of a sentence, and it lands harder when you remember what Ippolito is actually doing here. He’s not just playing a famous person. He’s playing Sylvester Stallone at the exact moment in his life when nobody knew his name — a broke, struggling actor in the mid-1970s with a script nobody wanted and a condition nobody would accept: that he, and only he, would play the lead.

USA Today picked up on the same energy, noting that the huge crowd response from the premiere audience is a good sign that I Play Rocky, like its namesake, could be an Oscar contender. That’s the kind of sentence that gets a film’s awards team very excited, very early in the morning.

For Ippolito, the role is the kind of break actors spend a decade chasing. He first got real attention playing a young Al Pacino in The Offer, the Paramount+ series about the making of The Godfather — another job that asked him to step into the shoes of a screen legend and not flinch. Now he’s done it again, only this time he’s carrying the whole film on his shoulders.

The story behind the story

Here’s the thing about Rocky: everyone knows the movie, but the story of how it got made is almost better than the movie itself. Stallone wrote the script in a burst in 1975, inspired by a real fight he’d watched on television — journeyman boxer Chuck Wepner going fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali and somehow staying on his feet. Stallone saw a nobody who refused to fall down, and he saw himself in it.

He was, by every account, flat broke. The stories from that period have become Hollywood legend: the tiny apartment, the dog he couldn’t afford to feed, the script he hawked around town while producers told him the same thing over and over. They loved the script. They just didn’t want him in it. He was too unknown, too rough around the edges, too much of a risk.

Stallone said no to the money — repeatedly — until a studio agreed to his terms: a shoestring budget of around a million dollars, and Stallone in the role. The film went on to earn more than $200 million worldwide, picked up ten Oscar nominations, and won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Film Editing. Stallone himself was nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay in the same year, a feat almost nobody pulls off.

I Play Rocky tells that story. The official synopsis calls it “an electrifying true story about an unknown actor with an unshakable belief that he wasn’t just meant to write Rocky — he was meant to be Rocky Balboa,” adding that, told no at every turn, Stallone “bets everything on himself, holding the line on playing the lead against seemingly impossible odds. The result is the ultimate underdog story behind the ultimate underdog movie.”

Written by Peter Gamble and directed by Peter Farrelly, the film has one of those premises that sounds simple until you try to pull it off. It’s not a boxing movie, really. It’s a movie about stubbornness — the useful kind, the kind that looks a lot like delusion right up until the moment it works.

Farrelly takes on a different kind of underdog

Farrelly is an interesting choice for this one, and maybe a smarter one than it looks at first glance. The director behind There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber won the Best Picture Oscar for Green Book, a film that also hinged on an unlikely partnership and a road nobody expected to end well. He has a feel for stories where the odds are stacked and the characters keep going anyway — which, come to think of it, is the whole point of Rocky too.

The cast around Ippolito is stacked with people who know their way around a period piece and a big emotional swing. AnnaSophia Robb, who broke through as a child star in Bridge to Terabithia and went on to The Carrie Diaries and Little Fires Everywhere, plays Sasha Czack, Stallone’s first wife — the person who was there for the broke years, when the whole thing was still just a script and a dream. Stephan James, who played Jesse Owens in Race and broke hearts in If Beale Street Could Talk, rounds out a cast that mixes old hands and rising names in exactly the right proportions.

Matt Dillon, Toby Kebbell and Tracy Letts — three actors who never phone it in — filled out the carpet on Wednesday, and the whole evening had the feel of a cast that genuinely likes each other. That’s not always the case at these things. Sometimes a premiere feels like a work obligation with better lighting. This one looked like a celebration.

Why this one hits different

Hollywood loves a movie about itself, but it doesn’t always love them well. For every great behind-the-scenes story, there’s a self-congratulatory mess that mistakes nostalgia for drama. The early response to I Play Rocky suggests this one dodges that trap, mostly because the Stallone story is genuinely dramatic on its own terms. Nobody had to invent stakes. The man bet his rent money on himself and won.

There’s also something quietly perfect about the timing. Fifty years on from the original film, the underdog story still works — maybe because the business hasn’t actually changed all that much. Unknown actors are still getting told no. Scripts are still getting passed over. And every now and then, somebody refuses to move, and the whole thing turns on a dime.

Ippolito knows that feeling better than most. A few years ago he was the guy playing Al Pacino in a streaming series about a movie from 1972. Now he’s the guy playing Stallone in a movie about a movie from 1976, and the critics are using words like “breakout” and “star is born.” If the film lands the way the Toronto crowds suggest it will, this time next year we might be talking about him in a very different way.

And then there’s the simple, old-fashioned pleasure of it: a crowd-pleaser, opening in theaters, with a true story that already has one of the greatest endings in movie history built in. We all know how this one turns out. Stallone got his shot. Rocky became Rocky. The kid from the tiny apartment became one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.

The trick, for Ippolito and Farrelly, is making us feel the part we don’t know — the part where none of that was guaranteed, where every door was closed, and where the only thing standing between Stallone and oblivion was his refusal to budge. If the Toronto reviews are right, they pulled it off.

What happens next

I Play Rocky hits theaters on Friday, November 6. The New York premiere was the last big stop before audiences get their say, and if the reaction in that room on Wednesday night is anything to go by, audiences are going to have plenty to say.

Keep an eye on the awards conversation, too. A film that opens in early November with this kind of critical heat and a crowd-pleasing true story is positioned exactly where you want to be when Oscar season starts to take shape. The Variety review alone will have put Ippolito’s name on a lot of lists that didn’t have it a month ago.

For now, though, the movie is just a movie, opening on Friday, with a young actor who bet on himself playing a young actor who bet on himself. There’s a symmetry to that that’s hard not to root for.

Source: Just Jared