Sylvester Stallone attends 'Tulsa King' season 3 New York screening on Sept. 16, 2025. Rob Kim/Getty Images Sylvester Stallone is weighing in on seeing his life’s story retold on the big screen in the upcoming biopic I Play Rocky.
The film, which premiered to much fanfare at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, follows the making of 1976’s Rocky, with Anthony Ippolito playing a young version of Stallone as he develops and pushes the film through a tumultuous production.
During a chat at 92NY on Monday promoting his new memoir The Steps, Stallone reacted to the project, admitting he was initially “kind of mixed because I’m going, ‘I’m not dead yet. Aren’t we jumping the gun a little bit?’ And then I saw this video of this kid [Ippolito]. I actually thought it was me the first moment; there were a couple of angles. I go to my daughter and say, ‘That’s unbelievable.'”
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The star emphasized he has “nothing to do” with the movie, which was directed by Peter Farrelly. “I said, ‘I’ll just sit back and watch.’ I talked to the kid. I said, ‘If you want any questions, here I am,’ and that was it. But they did it all on their own,” as Stallone joked that in seeing Ippolito’s portrayal, “I go, ‘Do I talk like that?’ Now I get it. Now I get it.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Stallone spoke about what it’s like for him to watch the Rocky movies now (“It’s like you look at a photo of yourself, everyone else likes it, but you go [growl]”) and revealed he’s trying to get Amazon to let him recut 1990’s Rocky V, calling the movie “a thorn in my side.”
“It bothers me to death because I know I took my foot off the gas,” he said, noting that he should have directed it himself and “I should have been more aware of not trying to be cool to the audience.” He joked that if he’s able to do a recut, “It’s not going to be great. It’ll be acceptable.”
Stallone was also asked by the moderator, CBS Sunday Morning’s Tracy Smith, if he thinks he could make it to the top of Hollywood if he was just starting out today.
“It’s a whole different ideology out there… I don’t think so. It’s a whole different mindset,” he replied. “The actors look different. They act different — not the mentality, but the subject matter isn’t something that I could relate to. Like action right now is kind of anachronistic.”
He continued, “For example, if you were going to make The Godfather today, try casting it. Impossible. The whole premise — it just came at a certain time, and that’s why it makes it so unique. So quite often when they do remakes, they’re fundamentally forgetting that that film was based on the social climate, the thing, the look, the ethnicity, everything that there was going on at that time. Today, you couldn’t cast the film.”
The Steps hits bookshelves on Tuesday.
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