President Trump rewrote the script on how Sylvester Stallone got here to play “Rocky” when he advised a Kennedy Middle crowd on Wednesday that movie executives insisted the aspiring actor play the title character within the 1976 movie.
For practically 50 years, its been identified that Stallone campaigned to play Rocky Balboa as producers did every little thing of their energy to persuade him to give up the script he wrote to a longtime star.
However that wasn’t the story Trump advised when he named Stallone amongst this yr’s Kennedy Middle Honors recipients.
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Sylvester Stallone first starred as Rocky Balboa within the unique “Rocky” which was launched in 1976.
“He wouldn’t do it,” Trump stated Wednesday. “And it turned out that when [executives] saw him, they said, ‘You know, you’d be actually pretty good for this role.’ He had never done this before —think — anything like it.”
Stallone’s private underdog story famously parallels Balboa’s story as an unknown fighter who will get an unlikely shot on the heavyweight championship and vastly overachieves.
The 79-year-old Hell’s Kitchen native studied drama on the College of Miami and appeared in “The Lords of Flatbush” with Henry Winkler, in addition to a number of small movie roles, earlier than doing “Rocky” in 1976. Nonetheless, he was a longshot for the main man position that went on to make him well-known.
Stallone stated in a 1977 BBC interview that he badgered producers to solid him as Balboa, even after they supplied him $265,000 “to stay away” from the cameras. However his intestine advised him that if he offered the “Rocky” script and didn’t seem within the film, he’d remorse it.
“I knew that after the money was gone I would become very bitter for having sold out because my one love was to at least fail on my own terms,” he stated. “I wanted to see if I could act.”
Stallone stated filmmakers pitched the script to James Caan, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford and Gene Hackman earlier than the scrappy newcomer satisfied producers he’d work lots more durable and for lots cheaper than these stars if given the prospect.
He finally struck a deal that allowed him to play Balboa, however gave executives a number of choices to vary the lead character in the event that they didn’t like what they have been seeing. The position labored out so nicely that Stallone reprised it in 5 extra movies.
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Donald Trump has approached Sylvester Stallone about working the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts.
In Trump’s model of occasions, Stallone had sway over who performed Balboa, however didn’t need it to be him.
“He didn’t want to play [the role],” Trump stated. “He did it as a writer, but he ended up playing it because he couldn’t find anybody else that fit the role.”
Initially Printed: August 13, 2025 at 1:23 PM EDT
