Nobody ran the idea past Sylvester Stallone, 80, before President Donald Trump made him one of three special ambassadors to Hollywood. The “Rocky” star found out the way the rest of the country did — from his television — and he told The Sunday Times in an interview reported September 21, 2026, that the job was one he had no intention of taking.

Stallone sat for the lengthy interview to promote his autobiography, “The Steps.” The appointment, he said, caught him completely off guard. The president heard as much from the actor himself in the end: the assignment would never work.

A question put to the actor was whether those doubts ever reached the president. Asked if he had voiced them to Trump, Stallone said: “Yes, and I said thank you and ciao, because it’s impossible.” He continued: “Hollywood works and it will evolve. It’s corporate and corporate people won’t want to hear me tell them about finance.” By one account, the actor “ultimately reached out to the president to turn down the unofficial position,” rather than being asked about it in passing.

An Announcement He Saw on TV

The whole thing, by his recollection, “just happened.” He was in front of the TV one night when a broadcast started reading off names: his own, plus those of fellow actors Mel Gibson and Jon Voight. His reaction was disbelief, Stallone said, and he asked out loud whether he had heard it right. Had anyone consulted him beforehand, he said, he would have told them the idea was unworkable.

Trump named Stallone, Gibson and Voight his “Special Ambassadors” to Hollywood in January 2025, calling the business a “great but very troubled place.” No job description ever followed, and what the three men were actually supposed to do was never clarified.

Yes, he had reservations, Stallone said when the question was put to him — and he laid them out 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. Six studios, he added, are not places anyone walks into to dictate how their operations should be run — and Gibson, Voight and he are all people inclined to do their own thing.

Six Studios and Little Kingdoms

“The Steps” has him going back over a career and a set of relationships built up across decades — one of them with the man now in the Oval Office.

No Sign of a Wider Rift

The two men have orbited each other for years. A photographer caught Stallone miming a punch at Trump during a charity event in 1997. The actor said in 2016 that he “loved” him. And when Trump won the 2024 election, Stallone was the one who 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 during an Oval Office ceremony.

The surprise was not his alone. Gibson, too, has said the Hollywood announcement caught him off guard, though at the time he indicated a willingness to take on the job for Trump. Voight rounded out the trio as the third name on the list, swept into the same project whose scope was never publicly defined.

What the episode captures is how the appointment actually landed: three actors announced as envoys to an industry none of them runs, handed the job of repairing something the president described in sweeping terms but never spelled out. One of the three saw the news break on his own television set and concluded the task could not be done.

Saying no, though, appears to have cost Stallone nothing with Trump. He delivered the answer gently, by his own telling — a thank you, a goodbye and a plain explanation of why the assignment was never going to survive contact with Hollywood.