Trump rewrites Sylvester Stallone's 'Rocky' history at Kennedy Center event

Brian Niemietz, New York Daily News on Aug 13, 2025

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

President Donald Trump rewrote the script on how Sylvester Stallone came to play “Rocky” when he told a Kennedy Center crowd on Wednesday that film executives insisted the aspiring actor play the title character in the 1976 film.

For nearly 50 years, its been known that Stallone campaigned to play Rocky Balboa as producers did everything in their power to convince him to surrender the script he wrote to an established star.

But that wasn’t the story Trump told when he named Stallone among this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients.

“He wouldn’t do it,” Trump said 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 personal underdog tale famously parallels Balboa’s story as an unknown fighter who gets an unlikely shot at the heavyweight championship and greatly overachieves.

The 79-year-old Hell’s Kitchen native studied drama at the University of Miami and appeared in “The Lords of Flatbush” with Henry Winkler, as well as several small film roles, before doing “Rocky” in 1976. Still, he was a longshot for the leading man role that went on to make him famous.

Stallone said in a 1977 BBC interview that he badgered producers to cast him as Balboa, even after they offered him $265,000 “to stay away” from the cameras. But his gut told him that if he sold the “Rocky” script and didn’t appear in the movie, he’d regret 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 said. “I wanted to see if I could act.”

Stallone said filmmakers pitched the script to James Caan, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford and Gene Hackman before the scrappy newcomer convinced producers he’d work a lot harder and for a lot cheaper than those stars if given the chance.

He eventually struck a deal that allowed him to play Balboa, but gave executives several options to change the lead character if they didn’t like what they were seeing. The role worked out so well that Stallone reprised it in five more films.

In Trump’s version of events, Stallone had sway over who played Balboa, but didn’t want it to be him.

“He didn’t want to play [the role],” Trump said. “He did it as a writer, but he ended up playing it because he couldn’t find anybody else that fit the role.”