Nobody ran the idea past Sylvester Stallone. The star of the “Rocky” films learned he was one of President Donald Trump’s three special ambassadors to Hollywood by watching television, the same way the public did, he told The Sunday Times in an interview reported September 21, 2026.
Stallone sat for the lengthy interview to promote his autobiography, “The Steps,” and said the appointment blindsided him. He eventually told the president the assignment would never work.
Had he passed those doubts along to Trump? “Yes, and I said thank you and ciao, because it’s impossible,” Stallone said. He went on: “Hollywood works and it will evolve. It’s corporate and corporate people won’t want to hear me tell them about finance.”
An Announcement He Saw on TV
It “just happened,” he recalled. He was in front of the TV one night when a broadcast began reeling off names — his own, plus those of fellow actors Mel Gibson and Jon Voight. Disbelief was his reaction, Stallone said, and he asked out loud whether he had heard it right. Anyone who had checked with him first, he said, would have been told the idea was unworkable. Stallone, who is 80, says the appointment was made without his prior consent and that he never formally agreed to take on the role, and he reached out to the president to turn it down.
Trump named Stallone, Gibson and Voight his “Special Ambassadors” to Hollywood — a business he called a “great but very troubled place” — in a January 16, 2025 post on his Truth Social platform, days before his second inauguration. The post began, “It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great…” The three actors, he said, would serve as his “eyes and ears” in Hollywood and advise him on efforts to bring film and television production back to the US.
Six Studios and Little Kingdoms
Yes, he had reservations, Stallone said, and he explained them in the language of a man who has spent decades inside the business. “Hollywood, I guess it’s like feudal states. They have their little kingdoms,” he said. Nobody walks into six studios and tells them how to run their operations, he added. He, Gibson and Voight, he said, are all the sort of people who go off and do their own thing.
The account comes as Stallone promotes “The Steps,” a book that sends him back through a career and a set of relationships built over decades — among them the one he has with the man now in the Oval Office.
No Sign of a Wider Rift
The two men have circled each other for years. A photographer caught Stallone miming a punch at Trump during a charity event in 1997. In 2016, the actor said he “loved” him. And after Trump won the 2024 election, Stallone brought him onstage at a Mar-a-Lago gala, billing him as a “second George Washington” and “a really mythical character.”
That warmth has held. Stallone was named a Kennedy Center honoree last year, and Trump presented him with a medal at an Oval Office ceremony.
He was not the only one blindsided. Gibson has also said the Hollywood announcement surprised him, though at the time he suggested he was ready to take the job on for Trump. Voight, the third name on the list, was folded into the same assignment.
The episode is a snapshot of how the appointment actually landed. Trump had announced three actors as envoys to an industry none of them runs, asking them to help repair a business he described in sweeping terms. One of them watched it unfold on his own television set and concluded the job could not be done.
Saying no appears to have cost Stallone nothing with Trump. His refusal had nothing to do with their personal relationship, he said, and everything to do with his belief that the task was practically impossible. He delivered the answer gently, by his own telling — thanks, a goodbye and a straightforward account of why the job would not survive contact with Hollywood.
