Schwarzenegger and Stallone look back on their legendary rivalry

“I felt like the only way to catch him was if he tripped,” Arnold Schwarzenegger recalled.

The Cold War between Arnold Schwarzenegger And Sylvester Stallone was the heyday of Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s. Race for roles, jokes, unfair exits… Anything was allowed, even the lowest. Since then, the two actors have buried the hatchet, and regularly return to these years of competition.

In an interview titled “Arnold & Sly: Rivals, friends, icons” (“Arnold & Sly: Rivals, Friends, Icons”), the performers of Rambo and Terminator returned to the origins of their competition. At a time when the codes of masculinity were more than caricatures, it all started with a question of physics:

“Well, what is your body fat percentage?remembers Schwarzenegger, in the show, relayed by The Hollywood Reporter. I was only at 7%. So I said I only had 10% left – it became a competition with our bodies.”

A few years ago, Sylvester Stallone already said in the Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show : “Have you ever hated someone so much that they said to yourself: 'I have to go to the gym' ?”.

An athletic duel which quickly turned into something more symbolic. Arnold Schwarzenegger also talks about the impact this competition had on the characters they chose to play and their actions: “He started using huge machine guns. I was chasing him. He was running after me… That's how it happened. He killed 80 people (in Rambo) and I had to kill 87”.

The former Governor of California refers here to the similarities observed between the Rambo by Stallone (1982) and his Commando (1985), two films in which the main characters are former soldiers forced to return to service, in a fight alone against everyone. A resemblance which is therefore not insignificant, and which fueled the box office of those years.

“We have arrived at a certain timeadds Silvester Stallone. Movies were in transition – real action movies didn't exist. We saw car chases, we saw gunshots. There was no action film where we said to ourselves: 'Okay, from start to finish, this guy is on the move. He does things. He makes the action happen'. So we started something that I don't think exists anymore, at least not in the way that it used to – where there was a man fighting against the world. Today, it’s more like the whole against the world.”

During the conversation, Arnold Schwarzenegger refers to another film, Stop or my mother will shoot! (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot in original version), a real critical flop released in 1992. Originally, the scenario was proposed to Schwarzy who could only see how bad it was. “I read the script and it was shit,” he confided to Jimmy Kimmel during the promotion of Terminator: Dark Fate. The opportunity for the American-Austrian actor to set a trap for his direct competitor.

Ensuring that Stallone was also offered the role of Sergeant Joe Bomoski, he spread rumors that he was on the verge of accepting the role. Caught in the spiral of “whatever it costs”Sylvester Stallone then jumped on the role to prevent the performer from Last Action Hero to see her.

“I was over the moon, of course. I felt like the only way to catch him was if he trippedexplains Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was psychological. It's quite a story about Hollywood. You're still as good as your last film. So I figured if Sly tripped…”

A temporary satisfaction, because although very relatively comparable to A Cop in Kindergarten or to Twinstwo films in which Arnold Schwarzenegger also dropped machine guns and hand grenades, Stop or my mother will shoot! still enjoyed a certain public success, with 72 million dollars raked in at the worldwide box office.

Fortunately, this squabble ended up running out of steam. The two actors even symbolically smoked the peace pipe in Expendables: special unita film directed by Stallone and in which Schwarzy makes an appearance, but also in Escape of Mikael Hafstrom of which they share the poster.

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