How a 27-year-old talked his way into Stallone's boxing gloves in ‘I Play Rocky'

Anthony Ippolito saw the opportunity of a lifetime when he learned that Oscar-winning director Peter Farrelly was developing a film about Sylvester Stallone’s determination to write and star in the original “Rocky.” There was just one problem: Nobody had asked him to audition for “I Play Rocky.” “So, I kind of just took it upon myself to make some stuff on my own and kind of send it to them unsolicited,” the 27-year-old actor said in a recent interview with The Associated Press ahead of the movie s limited release Friday. It was a move that could be seen as taking a page from the book of Stallone s own improbable rise to stardom but, for Ippolito, “it didn’t really necessarily feel that way at the time, to be honest. I was just hoping somebody would see it.” Farrelly did — and was convinced from the start. “He sent his tape, you know, cold, and we’re like, that’s the guy,” the director recalled. “We were going to do a worldwide search, we never did it.” Farrelly was part