Arnold Schwarzenegger Explains How His Rivalry With Stallone Was “Out Of Control” In The 80s

Former Predator slayer Arnold Schwarzenegger said his rivalry with Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s and 90s “got out of control,” primarily because a lot of their movies during that time had been released nearly back-to-back.

In an episode of “The Graham Norton Show” (via NME), Schwarzenegger went on to explain the Hollywood rivalry.

“We were movie rivals, but we took the competitiveness to the extreme — we each had to have the best body, we had to kill more people in our films, and we had to have the biggest guns,” Schwarzenegger said. “It got out of control, and we tried to derail each other.”

This wasn’t the first time either one has spoken about their rivalry. In a Forbes interview, Stallone said that they “really disliked each other immensely” due to their movies always competing with one another.

Thanks to Variety, we know that the main thing that helped mend their relationship was when they both invested in Planet Hollywood. Following that, they “started flying around the world together to promote it” and, in the process, “became fantastic friends.” Since then, the two have become “inseparable.”

“This may sound a little vain, but I think we were pioneering a kind of genre at that time and it hasn’t been seen since, really,” Stallone said. “So the competition, because it’s his nature, he is very competitive and so am I… and I just thought it actually helped, but off-screen we were still competitive, and that was not a healthy thing at all, but we’ve become really good friends.”

The same Variety report goes on to explain how Stallone believes that Schwarzenegger was the better actor of the two when it came to action.

“He was superior,” Stallone continued about Schwarzenegger. “He just had all the answers. He had the body. He had the strength. That was his character. I had to get my ass kicked constantly, whereas Arnold, he never got hurt much. And I’m going, ‘Arnold, you could go out and fight a dragon and you’d come back with a Band-Aid.'”

For more entertainment news, be sure to check out our gallery highlighting the best action movies of the 1980s and our gallery highlighting the best action movies of the 1990s.