Sylvester Stallone admits Arnold Schwarzenegger a ‘superior’ action movie star

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Sylvester Stallone is looking back on his rivalry with Arnold Schwarzenegger during their heyday in the 1980s.

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But rather than saying that the two were equals, Stallone admits that Schwarzenegger was the “superior” action hero of the era.

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“The ’80s was a very interesting time because the definitive ‘action guy’ had not really been formed yet,” Stallone says in Arnold, a new Netflix docuseries that charts Schwarzenegger’s rise from his humble beginnings in Austria to one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars. “Up until that time, action was a car chase like Bullitt or The French Connection, and a film all about intellect and innuendo and verbal this and verbal that.”

“Sly was ahead of me in the ’80s so it was for me to catch up,” Schwarzenegger says. “We were competing about everything,” he adds. “The body being ripped and oiled up. Who is more vicious. Who is more tough. Who uses bigger knives. Who uses bigger guns. Sly and I were at war.”

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As Schwarzenegger’s stock began to rise thanks to his work in the Conan films, the first Terminator movie, Commando, Predator and more, Stallone says that the two “couldn’t even stand to be in the same room.”

“We were incredibly antagonistic,” he says. “People had to separate us.”

Likening their rivalry to the ones between boxing heavyweights Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Stallone concedes that Schwarzenegger emerged as the “superior” star when it came to action films.

“He was superior. He just had all the answers. He had the body. He had the strength. That was his character,” Stallone says.

“I had to get my ass kicked constantly, whereas Arnold, he never got hurt much,” Stallone continues. “And I’m going, ‘Arnold, you could go out and fight a dragon and you’d come back with a Band-Aid.’”

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But Schwarzenegger says that the competition between the two helped fuel his own ambition and cement his own success.

“Every time he came out with a movie like Rambo II, I had to figure out a way of now outdoing that. Without Stallone, I maybe wouldn’t have been as motivated in the ’80s to do the kind of movies that I did and to work as hard as I did.”

Their behind-the-scenes drama got so bad that Schwarzenegger previously said he tricked Stallone into making the flop comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot in 1992.

“I read the script, and it was a piece of s***. Let’s be honest. I say to myself, ‘I’m not going to do this movie,’” Schwarzenegger explained on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2019. “Then they went to Sly, and Sly called me, ‘Have they ever talked to you about doing this movie?’ And I said, yes, I was thinking about doing it. ‘This is a really brilliant idea, this movie.’ When he heard that, because he was in competition, he said, ‘Whatever it takes, I’ll do the movie.’ And of course the movie went major into the toilet.”

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But with their conflict in the rearview mirror, Stallone admitted to Postmedia last November that he’s still fuelled by the notion that he has to prove something.

“People say to me, ‘You have nothing left to prove,’ and those are just words. In your insecure brain there’s always that notion that (makes you wonder), can you still do it? Do you still have it? If you don’t do it, are you going to be forgotten?” he said. “The fear of failure makes you say, ‘I still got something left in me.’”

Meanwhile, in an interview with Postmedia in May, Schwarzenegger said he was inspired to pursue his Hollywood dream in spite of his father’s desire that he follow in his footsteps to become a police officer.

“He was very upset that I didn’t make his dream a reality. But I was more interested in making my dream become reality, which was to go to America, become a world champion bodybuilder and get into show business and eventually play a police officer rather than being one.”

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Stallone and Schwarzenegger eventually settled their feud and became friends and business partners in the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain. The duo also appeared opposite one another in the first two Expendables movies and the 2013 action thriller Escape Plan.

Arnold is now streaming on Netflix.

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