\n\t\u201cI Play Rocky<\/a>\u201d held its world premiere Saturday night as part of the festival\u2019s Special Presentations program at the Princess of Wales Theatre. It\u2019s one of the very first movies that has played at the festival that has the potential to win TIFF\u2019s highest honor \u2014 the People\u2019s Choice Award. Multiple applauses rang throughout the film as the film recreates the highest points of the 1976 MGM flick that became the highest grossing movie of its respective year, went on to be nominated for 10 Oscars<\/a>, and winning three including best picture. A post-screening Q&A with Farelly, Ipplolito, Stephan James, Jay Duplass and screenwriter Peter Gamble.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\u201cI Play Rocky\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of TIFF<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s a certain symmetry in watching a movie about an unknown who bet everything on himself arrive at the very festival that once turned a modest crowd-pleaser into a best picture winner. Farrelly knows that route. Eight years ago, \u201cGreen Book\u201d won the TIFF People\u2019s Choice Award and marched all the way to a best picture statuette. Now the director returns to TIFF with \u201cI Play Rocky,\u201d the story of how a broke, stubborn Sylvester Stallone talked Hollywood into letting him write and star in \u201cRocky.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tThe film chronicles one of Hollywood\u2019s most improbable success stories: a struggling actor with a script nobody wanted and one nonnegotiable demand \u2014 that he play the lead himself. As studios dangle money on the condition that an established star throw the punches, Stallone digs in, turning the standoff that follows into its own kind of prizefight.<\/p>\n \n\tThe film\u2019s origin, Farrelly told the Princess of Wales crowd, came down to a script and a self-tape. \u201cI read this script and I thought it was the greatest script I\u2019d ever read,\u201d he said of Peter Gamble\u2019s screenplay, before recounting how the search for his Stallone ended almost before it began. The director said his casting agent called one day claiming to have found the lead \u2014 a then-unknown Anthony Ippolito, who had gotten hold of the script and shot three scenes himself in his grandmother\u2019s basement. \u201cI looked at it and the search was over,\u201d Farrelly said. \u201cThat\u2019s the guy. We didn\u2019t have to go any further.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIf the casting feels like fate, that\u2019s because it more or less is. Ippolito, a 27-year-old Long Island native who has been working since childhood, broke out as George Wright in the Netflix drama series \u201cGrand Army\u201d in 2020. He followed with a turn as a young Al Pacino in the Paramount+ limited series \u201cThe Offer,\u201d about the making of \u201cThe Godfather.\u201d That makes \u201cI Play Rocky\u201d the second time he has played a young Italian American icon at the dawn of a best picture winner \u2014 a coincidence too neat to ignore. 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. <\/p>\n \n\tFor Ippolito, stepping into the role meant a transformation that stretched across years, not months. \u201cIt took a lot of effort, upwards of a year and a half to two years,\u201d the actor told the crowd, thanking Farrelly and the team for the gamble. \u201cI\u2019m just so grateful that they were willing to take a chance on me in this situation.\u201d Then, taking in the room: \u201cThis is absolutely surreal.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe film carries the same magic and fervor as the 1976 original, and it stands as Peter Farrelly\u2019s finest outing behind the camera \u2014 a triumph that plays as both a People\u2019s Choice contender and a genuine Oscar threat. Film Twitter has made its position on Farrelly clear, and the knives will be out again, but that crowd has never been the point. This one is right up the Academy\u2019s alley. The bench is deep, too. AnnaSophia Robb is quietly devastating as Sasha Czack, Stallone\u2019s first wife and earliest believer, while Matt Dillon plays Frank Stallone Sr. Stephan James steps into the trunks as Carl Weathers, the actor who would become Apollo Creed, and Kiki Seto plays Talia Shire opposite Robert Morgan\u2019s Burgess Meredith and Scot Teller\u2019s Burt Young. Jay Duplass rounds out the group as \u201cRocky\u201d director John G. Avildsen, with P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell as producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff \u2014 Byrne proving yet again what a formidable character actor he is, his Winkler nothing short of sublime.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI Play Rocky\u201d premiered Sept. 12 at the Toronto International Film Festival. Amazon MGM Studios opens the film in limited release Nov. 6, expanding nationwide Nov. 20.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yo Adrian, Rocky did it \u2026 again! Only this time, the famed character is at TIFF in biopic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":894108,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[108725,49,48,75,108726,18744,15896],"class_list":["post-894107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-anthony-ippolito","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-i-play-rocky","tag-oscars","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/894108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/themes\/pmc-variety-2020\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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