Fifty years ago, a broke and largely unknown actor named Sylvester Stallone walked into United Artists with a modest script about a journeyman boxer and a very big request. He wanted to play the lead himself, despite having almost no acting experience. They said yes. The rest is movie history.
Today, Stallone is 80 years old, a Kennedy Center honoree, and one of the most successful stars in Hollywood history. His films (Rocky, Rambo, The Expendables) have generated billions of dollars. He is still working, starring as mobster Dwight “The General” Manfredi in the Paramount+ series Tulsa King.
And yet, sitting in a luxury Manhattan hotel for a recent interview, he still sounds like the kid who could not quite believe any of it.
“It would be so disingenuous to say you’re an underdog, ‘as he said from his penthouse,'” Stallone told the Associated Press. “Yeah. Come on. I am a lucky dog.”
A Book, a Movie, and a Walk Back Through Time
Stallone has spent this year reliving the whole improbable journey. His memoir, Steps, was published recently. And just weeks later, director Peter Farrelly’s film I Play Rocky arrives in theaters, a fictionalized, semi-authorized telling of Stallone’s early years, with Anthony Ippolito playing the young Sly. Farrelly spoke with Stallone about the film, though Stallone was otherwise uninvolved in making it.
The timing means everything. Rocky beat out Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men, among others, to win the Best Picture Oscar. It turns 50 nearly to the day that I Play Rocky hits theaters.
Stallone says he was floored by the film. “It’s fantastic. And the kid did a great job,” he said of Ippolito. “This is so odd. They usually do this when you’re dead and gone.”
He credits Farrelly for making him see his own story clearly. “Rocky is fiction,” Stallone said, echoing Farrelly’s view. “This is real. And that’s what people are holding on to.”
The Insecurity That Drove It All
Writing the memoir meant digging up things he had spent decades trying to forget. He describes himself in Steps as an unplanned and unwanted child who faced constant discouragement, right up through the production of Rocky itself, when he feared every day on set might be his last.
“I spent 50 years burying that stuff,” he said. “And it’s like you come across a lost city, and you start to become your own spiritual archaeologist, digging down. And it’s not pretty.”
But he does not frame that hardship as a wound. He frames it as the fuel. “If everything was really nice, maybe I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Insecurity is a great motivator.”
That drive has never fully quieted. Even now, with Tulsa King shooting a month away, he is up at 5 in the morning studying his lines. “Until it’s like breathing,” he said. “Now, that’s probably insecurity. But that’s the way I approach it.”
What Rocky Means Now
He says he does not sit down and watch Rocky anymore. But he stumbles across it online, an 18-year-old has posted a clip on TikTok, and there it is. And he notices something. Those young viewers are not connecting with him. They are connecting with the character.
“That to me is the greatest gift,” he said. “You write something; I’m just trying to get some footage on myself. I’m just trying to write something really simple. I didn’t ever expect it to be in more than one or two theaters. So all this is a tsunami of good luck.”
He says he cannot fully take credit for what Rocky tapped into. He just knows it was real, the story of someone at the end of their rope, asking for something bigger than themselves to believe in. At 29, he says, he had an epiphany in a backyard. No faith, no certainty, and then, suddenly, something shifted. He says that is why the very first scene in Rocky is set at a gym called The Resurrection.
After 50 years, the underdog is an 80-year-old man living in a Palm Beach estate with his wife, Jennifer Flavin. He has had back operations, neck surgeries, both shoulders, and heart surgery. He has made movies that shaped the way a whole generation thinks about grit and getting up off the mat.
And he still gets up at 5 in the morning. Lucky dog or not, some habits do not change.
