Sylvester Stallone Says He Never Accepted Trump’s Hollywood Ambassador Job
He found out he had the title while watching TV, he says, and told the president it was 'impossible.' What the job was supposed to do, and what Jon Voight and Mel Gibson did with theirs.
- Sylvester Stallone, 80, says he never agreed to be one of President Trump’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood and learned about it while watching TV.
- He told Trump the job was “impossible”: “I said thank you and ciao.” The other two, Jon Voight and Mel Gibson, kept working on it.
- The White House has not publicly responded. Trump gave Stallone a Kennedy Center Honor in December.
Sylvester Stallone was named one of three “Special Ambassadors” to Hollywood in January 2025. Twenty months later, he says he never took the job.
“I was watching TV one night and they go, ‘So Stallone and Mel Gibson and Jon Voight will be …’ And I went, ‘What?'” the Tulsa King star told The Sunday Times in an interview published Sept. 20. “Because if they had asked me in the beginning, I would have said, this is not possible.”
Why did Stallone turn down Trump’s Hollywood ambassador role?
Because, he says, nobody can tell Hollywood what to do.
Hollywood, I guess it’s like feudal states. They have their little kingdoms. You don’t go in and tell six studios how to do things.
Sylvester Stallone, to The Sunday Times
He added that he, Gibson and Voight are “do-our-own-thing people,” and that studio executives “won’t want to hear me tell them about finance.” His answer to the president, he said, was “thank you and ciao.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Stallone has remained on good terms with Trump: in December 2025 the president placed the Kennedy Center Honors medal around his neck at the White House.
What was the Hollywood ambassador job supposed to do?
Trump announced it on Truth Social days before his second inauguration, naming the three actors “Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood.” The post described a mission, bringing back business lost “to foreign countries,” but no duties, staff or budget.
The problem it pointed at is real. The U.S. has no federal film tax credit. Incentives are set state by state, so productions follow the money from state to state.
Many leave the country entirely, for the U.K., Canada or Australia, where national rebates cover a share of what a shoot spends there.
Voight has since pushed for a federal film and TV tax incentive, which would need Congress. Gibson has proposed a co-production agreement between Italy and the U.S. as a pilot. Gibson said at the time that he got the news “at the same time as all of you.”
Here he is last September, talking about Tulsa King, his career and Rocky.
More from Celebrities, including another Hollywood heavyweight’s week: Tom Cruise says Taylor Swift was schooling him on football. And the museum George Lucas just opened in Los Angeles is open to the public on Tuesday.
— Bruno Monteiro
Sources: Sylvester Stallone interview with The Sunday Times (Sept. 20, 2026); Donald Trump’s Truth Social post (January 2025); Mel Gibson’s statement (January 2025); TheWrap (J. Kim Murphy); Deadline (Glenn Garner); The Kennedy Center (2025 Honors). Photos: frames from TODAY, Sylvester Stallone Talks ‘Tulsa King’ S3, His Career, ‘Rocky’; Global News, Trump awards Kennedy Center Honors medals; and The Kennedy Center, Sylvester Stallone on Receiving a Kennedy Center Honor.
Reported from TODAY on Youtube.
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