I smell a studio promotional gimmick in here somewhere, but in the absence of proof, we’ll report it anyway. Filmstalker has picked up a strange story from Hollywood.com which says that in order to do Rocky Balboa Sly had to make his wife cry.

The story goes that she didn’t want him to do the film, for fear of his health. See, Stallone is just like a real life Rocky! Wait, she knows this is a movie, not an actual boxing match right? Her concern was that he’s too old to handle the training routine. Since Sly hasn’t dropped dead, I guess she was wrong. But at the time, she burst into tears when the 60-year-old actor told her he was taking the part.

To throw a little more fuel on what could easily become a media fire, Stallone admits that she was right. He says, “She was absolutely right. I mean, she was just defending her husband from what actually was a totally crazy idea, but now she likes it." Now all Stallone needs to do is come up with some sort of story about how he collapsed from the strain during filming, and then refused to go to the hospital and made them keep shooting anyway. That’ll get em.