Sylvester Stallone Says Trump's Hollywood Ambassador Role Is "Impossible"

Sylvester Stallone is opening up about the moment he discovered he’d been appointed as a special Hollywood ambassador by President Trump, and the story is wilder than you’d expect. He told The Sunday Times he learned about the role while watching TV, and if anyone had actually asked him beforehand, he would have said no. That’s about as candid as it gets from a guy with a government title.

His reasoning makes a lot of sense, too. Stallone compared Hollywood to a group of feudal states, explaining that you can’t just walk in and tell six studios how to run their finances. He also described himself as“almost a political atheist,”which raised some eyebrows given his past support for Trump. Meanwhile, fellow envoy Jon Voight is taking a much sunnier view, telling The Hollywood Reporter that matching global tax incentives could cause an“explosion of energy”in film production.

With Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight all sharing the same ambassador title, this whole arrangement is shaping up to be one of the more unusual Hollywood stories of the year. One envoy calls it impossible, another calls it promising, and the rest of us are just watching it all play out.

Do you think a celebrity envoy can actually change Hollywood, or is Stallone right that the whole idea is impossible?