Peter Farrelly returned to the Toronto International Film Festival Saturday night with “I Play Rocky,” a dramatization of Sylvester Stallone’s fight to get “Rocky” made, and the crowd response echoed the trajectory that carried Farrelly’s “Green Book” to a Best Picture win eight years ago at the same festival.
The film held its world premiere at the Princess of Wales Theatre as part of TIFF’s Special Presentations program. Audiences applauded repeatedly during the screening, especially as key scenes from the 1976 original were recreated on screen, and the film closed to a lengthy standing ovation. A Q&A followed with Farrelly, screenwriter Peter Gamble, and cast members Anthony Ippolito, Stephan James, and Jay Duplass.
“I Play Rocky” sidesteps Rocky Balboa’s boxing story entirely, focusing instead on the real standoff between Stallone and Hollywood studios in the mid-1970s. Broke and largely unknown, Stallone had written a script every studio wanted, but he refused to sell it unless he played the lead himself. Ippolito, previously known for playing a young Al Pacino in “The Offer,” stars as Stallone.
AnnaSophia Robb plays his first wife, Sasha Czack, and Stephan James portrays Carl Weathers, who would go on to play Apollo Creed. Matt Dillon, Tracy Letts, P.J. Byrne, and Toby Kebbell round out a cast built around producers and collaborators who shaped the original film.
Farrelly told the premiere audience that Gamble’s script was the best he had ever read, and revealed that a global casting search for the Stallone role became unnecessary once casting director Rick Montgomery brought Ippolito’s self-shot audition tape, filmed in his grandmother’s basement, to his attention.
The parallels to “Green Book” are difficult to ignore. That film debuted at TIFF in 2018, won the festival’s People’s Choice Award, and went on to collect three Oscars, including Best Picture. Farrelly has returned to Toronto with several projects since, including 2022’s “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” but “I Play Rocky” marks his clearest attempt yet at recapturing that path.
Early reviews have split along familiar lines: critics have called the film formulaic, while festival audiences have responded with the kind of enthusiasm that tends to translate into awards momentum. Distributor Amazon MGM Studios now faces a familiar question: whether a film about an underdog’s improbable rise can pull off the same feat in the race ahead.
