Sylvester Stallone isn’t softening his language about his decades-old rivalry with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sylvester, 80, looked back on the years when he and Arnold competed for Hollywood supremacy and admitted the animosity between them was very real.
In an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine on Saturday, September 19, Stallone compared their rivalry to having a “mortal enemy.”
Arnold, 79, and Stallone eventually became friends, but the “Rocky” star said things once felt far more serious.
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“I was the same with [Arnold] Schwarzenegger. We were at each other’s throats, big time. It wasn’t a joke. It was like life and death. We should have been together in the Roman Colosseum,” Stallone said.
He added, “It’s like when one fighter insults the other, he’s going to train so much to put a beating on the other. We needed each other, absolutely.”
GettyThe actors emerged as two of Hollywood’s biggest action stars during the 1980s, with Stallone leading the “Rocky” and “Rambo” franchises while Schwarzenegger found blockbuster success with movies including “The Terminator” and “Commando.”
Their competition extended beyond the box office as each tried to outdo the other.
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Stallone has never pretended their tension was manufactured for publicity.
During a 2022 appearance on “The Jonathan Ross Show,” he said the two “couldn’t stand to be in the same galaxy together for a while.”
“We truly, loathed each other,” he said at the time, as quoted by The Independent.
Schwarzenegger has also acknowledged how far things went, saying in 2023 that their competitiveness “got out of control” as they battled over everything from their physiques to the size of the weapons they carried onscreen.
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One of their most famous stories involved the 1992 comedy “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”
Stallone claimed Schwarzenegger made it appear that he wanted the project, prompting Stallone to pursue it himself.
“He’s quite clever. He goes around town saying, ‘I can’t wait to do this film…’ I go to my agent, ‘Get that thing away from him. Get people options on me,’” Stallone recalled in 2022, as per Business Insider.
“I got it and I said, ‘What a piece of [Expletive] this is.’ [Schwarzenegger] goes, ‘Ha ha ha!’”
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The rivalry eventually cooled, and the former competitors became close friends and collaborators.
They later appeared together in “The Expendables,” “The Expendables 2,” “The Expendables 3” and “Escape Plan.”
Stallone has even credited Schwarzenegger with having the edge during their competitive years.
“He was superior. He just had all the answers,” Stallone said in the 2023 Netflix documentary “Arnold,” as reported by Deadline. “He had the body. He had the strength. That was his character.”
Decades removed from their fiercest competition, Stallone now sees something useful in it. As he put it, the two men “needed each other.”
