Anthony Ippolito on becoming Stallone and going the distance for 'I Play Rocky'

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Set us as preferred Anthony Ippolito is in the midst of the kind of hyper-scheduled, dizzying promotional blitz that many actors hope for but rarely experience.“It’s a weird period of time,” he says over Zoom.

“It’s a part of the job of acting that I didn’t really think about.”The Long Island native, 26, who first caught the industry’s eye with a well-received portrayal of Al Pacino in the 2022 Paramount+ series “The Offer,” is commanding new attention for his performance in a similarly high-risk, high-reward project: playing Sylvester Stallone in “I Play Rocky,” the Peter Farrelly-directed film about the low-budget struggle to make the iconic 1976 boxing movie.Ippolito has been appearing at festivals and special advance screenings since the film’s auspicious debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where it began building strong word of mouth as well as life-altering possibilities for its star, whose performance has been called “transformative,” and “career-making.”“I’m slowly trying to get my bearings with this part of it — it’s pretty foreign,” he says.Ippolito, who started acting as a kid and pursued it more seriously after playing young Adam Sandler in 2015’s “Pixels,” is self-aware enough to be skeptical about the current hype, which he is still figuring out how to talk about.

“I’m taking things as they come, trying not to listen to too much of the noise.”Not listening to outside noise is a big part of how Ippolito ended up in “I Play Rocky.”“Nobody was asking me to audition,” he tells The Times from the Savannah Film Festival in Georgia, where he’s due to receive the Breakthrough Award in a few hours.Ippolito has an easy charm and nonchalance about him, possibly due to being jet-lagged and sleep-deprived, but his general vibe is re...