Did you know Sylvester Stallone has said plenty about faith over the years, including some pointed words for Christians who think they can skip church?
The trailer for I PLAY ROCKY, Amazon MGM Studios’ new biopic about the actor who refused to sell his own script unless he got to star in it, dropped this week, and 50 years after the original ROCKY made him a star, Stallone is still talking about the God he credits with writing it.
“Without the church it’s like having a boat without the rudder,” Stallone once told The Dove Foundation, back when he was promoting ROCKY BALBOA. “The church is the gym of the soul.”
Directed by Peter Farrelly and starring Anthony Ippolito as a young Stallone, I PLAY ROCKY tells the true story of an unknown actor betting everything on himself, holding out to play Rocky Balboa when studios wanted a bigger name attached. The movie hits theaters Nov. 6, the same month ROCKY first premiered back in 1976.
Stallone has long credited faith, not just grit, with getting that first script written at all. “I was never a writer and all of a sudden one day I felt like I was being asked to write this,” he said. “I’ve said it before, I felt as though God was moving me to do this.”
It’s why the original ROCKY opens on a mural of Jesus watching over the boxing ring, a detail Stallone has said was no accident. Raised Catholic, he’s talked openly about drifting from that faith at the height of his fame before eventually finding his way back to church.
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“Everyone in the church is on the same page in the sense of spirit and unity and oneness and you don’t get that alone,” he said. “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, I can do it on my own. I have a one-on-one relationship with God,’ well it’s not quite the same.” He didn’t soften the follow-up, either.
“Some people maybe try to justify their laziness,” Stallone said. “You take out what you put in.” Coming from Rocky Balboa himself, the trainers-and-gym metaphor tracks.
“The priests, the reverends, the ministers and the pastors, they are the trainers,” he told The Dove Foundation. “They are the ones that guide you over that difficult time and take you to that place that you don’t think you can go, but with their help you can go.”
For Stallone, that isn’t just theory.
“The more I go to church and the more I turn myself over to the process of believing in Jesus and to listening to his word and have him guide my hand,” he said, “I feel the pressure’s off me now. I really do.”
Movieguide® gave 2006’s ROCKY BALBOA, the film Stallone was promoting when he made these comments, credit for a message of grace, perseverance, courage and compassion, themes that hold up as I PLAY ROCKY sends a new generation back to where the story started. Coming from the guy who built a career on being the toughest man in the room, the reminder that even Rocky needed a corner man lands harder than it should.
For Christian families navigating a culture where church attendance increasingly reads as optional, Stallone’s take is a useful gut check: personal faith and showing up to a pew aren’t in competition, and the corniest guy in the gym might just be onto something true.
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