"It wasn't just escapism": Sylvester Stallone digs into the impact of 'Rocky' and his iconic career

To this day, Sylvester Stallone is one of the most recognisable names and faces in Hollywood. 

He's been in the game for almost six decades, and his story is infamous. 

After struggling for the first seven or eight years, he figured the only way to get a lead role was to write one himself – thus 'Rocky' was born, and the rest is history.  

A short time later he co-wrote the first 'Rambo' film, and even today, at 80 years old, he's still a leading man, starring in 'Tulsa King'.  

Stallone details his incredible career in a new memoir, 'The Steps', released a couple months ago. 

Rocky is one of the most iconic characters in film history, and although it's hard to imagine what the film would've been like if anyone else played the role, but Stallone believes it wouldn't have been as good. 

"I don't think it would have had a certain kind of deep sensitivity, because it was so personal that I sort of lived those scenes in my mind as a child growing up," he explained to Mike Hosking. 

"In other words, I felt that kind of isolation, I felt that dismissiveness, all that kind of stuff, and I just put it into the body of a fighter." 

"So I truly understood those emotions very, very well and the frustrations and the anger and everything else that went along with it." 

The franchise quickly became more than the sum of its parts, but it was when the fourth one was released that Stallone realised just how impactful it was for the audience. 

"I said, oh my God, this is actually catching on to the point where people are taking, deriving certain elements of them in the way that they apply it to their life," he told Hosking. 

"It wasn't just escapism." 

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