Why Sylvester Stallone's First Rocky Script Made His Wife Cry

Legend has it that Sylvester Stallone wrote the "Rocky" screenplay in three and a half days, but that's not quite how things went. The script that emerged from those frantic three days was nothing like the final film audiences embraced in 1976. In fact, the character of Rocky Balboa was initially so unlikeable and so mean that it made Stallone's then-wife cry.

Sly embodied the "it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward" ethos of Rocky Balboa when he wrote the pugilist's first film. Having moved to New York City in 1969 to pursue acting, the future star found himself working odd jobs and appearing in low budget fare just to make ends meet. We're talking cleaning out cages at the Central Park Zoo. Nobody walking past the enclosures back in the early '70s would have guessed that the kid "making $1.12 an hour to get pissed on by a lion" (as Stallone put it to Playboy back in 1978) would soon be a major star.

But it wasn't just his career the young actor was struggling with. At home, he had a pregnant wife and rent to make. That home was a small apartment which came complete with a landlord who was, as Sly told the BBC in 1977, "so big that when she came to collect the rent an entire shadow would cover the building." This "vicious individual" collected the $300 rent even though Stallone frequently found himself with less than half of that. With a pregnant wife, a less than ideal career trajectory, and a large bull mastiff who "would eat anything organic or unorganic," the actor churned out the script that would prove to be his breakthrough. But had he stuck with his first draft, it's likely that breakthrough wouldn't have happened.

Sylvester Stallone married his then-girlfriend Sasha Czack in 1974. Two years later, he'd become a big star with "Rocky" — though he'd have to fight for the lead role in his own movie and almost lost the part of Rocky Balboa to a "Gunsmoke" actor. It's a good thing he did fight, however. Stallone's everyman charm and gentle manner, alongside his undeniable underdog spirit, instantly established the character as a modern American legend. But it seems Czack is as much to thank for Balboa's easy affability as Sly himself.

After blacking out his apartment windows and typing up his first draft for "Rocky," Stallone was no doubt surprised to see Czack reduced to tears. These weren't tears of joy at the prospect of her husband becoming a huge star, either. Instead, she disliked Rocky Balboa as a character so much she became visibly upset, prompting Sly to make major changes.

In a 2025 interview for the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Stallone recalled his first draft being particularly rough. "Not many people know this — and I didn't think about it for many, many years, but in the first draft of 'Rocky,' he was not a nice character. He wasn't even a boxer. He was just a thug." The actor, who'll soon return for a fourth season of the Taylor Sheridan-penned "Tulsa King," went on to explain how Czack immediately made her feelings about Balboa clear. "My wife, who was typing the script on this crappy typewriter, said, 'I hate this character,'" recalled Stallone. "She was teary-eyed, sad. That one comment from my wife changed my whole life. And I went, Holy f***. I need to change this paradigm and give Rocky hope."

In the 1977 BBC interview, Sylvester Stallone explained his decision to make Rocky Balboa a boxer as stemming from his desire to craft an allegory for his days spent as a struggling actor. But it seems Sly was leaving out a huge part of the story at the time. Sasha Czack's reaction to the earliest iteration of "Rocky" shocked Sly into overhauling his main character, and it was only after this that he envisioned Balboa as a boxer. As he told AARP, "He still has one foot in the game, maybe as a sparring partner. That opened up that gigantic world of all these other characters in the fight world."

Without the boxing element, you arguably don't really have a movie, all of which really just raises the questions of where that first draft is today and how can we all read it? What is "Rocky" without the lovable leading man and the boxing? It must have been a truly dour story, no doubt reflective of Stallone's state of mind at the time. As such, Czack is surely the unsung hero of the "Rocky" franchise (well, her and "Happy Days," without which "Rocky" arguably wouldn't exist). Come to think of it, that menace of a landlord and ravenous dog probably deserve some of the credit.

Even Stallone admits that the legend surrounding his initial draft just isn't true. As he told AARP, "When people say, 'You wrote the screenplay in three days,' I say I wrote a spine. And then it just continued to branch out into something better, more empathetic. No, the original was rough."