Sylvester Stallone, whose Rocky Balboa opens today, has apparently accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and he’s making that known. I don’t know how to react to this, but it feels a little weird. I know Stallone slightly — I worked for him in the Rambo II days as an employee of publicists Bobby Zarem and Dick Delson, who had him as their #1 client at the time, and then I interviewed him on the set of Cliffhanger for a N.Y. Times piece in ’92 — and I can’t think of a less-likely convert. But whatever works.
Defamer‘s Mark Lisanti says it pretty well: “We suppose that it would be a little cynical of us to suggest that an opportunistic Stallone showed up to chat with Pat Robertson about how he’s put his career in God’s hands just to drum up some business from the Passion of the Christ crowd. At least (as far as we know) the actor didn’t go so far as to claim that he wrote the original script in the margins of a Bible while sitting in the confessional at his church, or relate an anecdote about how he finally won the fight with writing partner Jesus that resulted in Rocky being a scrappy, underdog boxer instead of a humble carpenter.”