Sylvester Stallone Addresses Donald Trump’s Hollywood Ambassador Appointment: ‘Impossible’

Sylvester Stallone is addressing President Donald Trump’s surprise decision to appoint him as a special ambassador to Hollywood.

“Well, it just happened. I was watching TV one night, and they go, ‘So Stallone and Mel Gibson and Jon Voight will be …’ And I went, ‘What?’” Stallone, 80, recalled to The Sunday Times in an interview published Sunday, September 20. “I said, ‘Excuse me? Really?’ Because if they had asked me in the beginning, I would have said, ‘This is not possible.’”

In January 2025, Trump, 80, named Stallone, Voight, 87, and Gibson, 70, as “Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK — BIGGER, BETTER AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”

At the time, the president said the three actors “will be my eyes and ears” in Hollywood and that he “will get done what they suggest.”

Stallone said he told Trump that the ambassadorship was “impossible” and that he would have rejected the title “if they had asked me in the beginning.”

“Hollywood, I guess it’s like feudal states. They have their little kingdoms,” the actor explained. “You don’t go in and tell six studios how to do things. And Mel Gibson and Jon Voight, we’re kind of do-our-own-thing people. No, it won’t work.”

Stallone continued, “I said, ‘Thank you and ciao’ because it’s impossible. Hollywood works and it will evolve. It’s corporate and corporate people won’t want to hear me tell them about finance.”