Yahoo News Sylvester Stallone calls Arnold Schwarzenegger the 'superior' action star: 'He had the strength'
Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are opening up about their bitter rivalry that spanned throughout the '80s — and which one of them ended up becoming the greatest action hero.
The pair, who have since gone on to become good friends, dug deep into the decades-long "war" that raged between them both on and off screen as part of Schwarzenegger's three-part Netflix docuseries Arnold. In the end, Stallone admitted that he believed Schwarzenegger to be the "superior" star between them.
"The '80s was a very interesting time because the definitive 'action guy' had not really been formed yet," Stallone, 76, recalled. "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."
It wasn't until his 1982 film First Blood that Stallone said action movies truly became about action. "You actually relied upon your body to tell the story. Dialogue was not necessary," he explained. "I saw that there was an opportunity, 'cause no one else was doing this… except some other guy from Austria, who doesn't need to say much."
Todd Williamson/Getty Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone
That guy from Austria was, of course, Schwarzenegger, who acknowledged that Stallone and his steady stream of box office hits had already put him way "ahead of me" when it came to becoming the action star of the decade. However, Schwarzenegger, 75, said that Stallone's success just pushed him to work even harder, adding, "Every time he came out with a movie like Rambo II, I had to figure out a way of now outdoing that."
Suddenly, Stallone, who had initially brushed off Schwarzenegger, realized that the fellow actor had "started to come on strong" with his wave of hit films — including 1984's The Terminator and 1985's Commando — and had become his biggest adversary.
"We became incredibly competitive," Stallone noted. "Like [Muhammad] Ali and [Joe] Frazier, or great warriors that are traveling the same course: There was only room for one of us."
Despite being up for similar roles, Stallone maintained that he and Schwarzenegger had "different styles of acting" from one another. "He was superior. He just had all the answers," he said of Schwarzenegger. "He had the body. He had the strength. That was his character."
Unlike Schwarzenegger and his perfectly polished protagonists, Stallone would often find himself being cast as "the guy that's not overly gifted" and had to fight for survival. "I had to get my ass kicked constantly, whereas Arnold, he never got hurt much," he remembered. "And I'm going, 'Arnold, you could go out and fight a dragon and you'd come back with a Band-Aid.'"
As their similar career trajectories clashed, Stallone and Schwarzenegger became "incredibly antagonistic" to one another in real life too. "We could 't even stand to be in the same room," revealed Stallone. "People had to separate us."
Arnold added, "We were competing about everything: 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."
In the end, Stallone admitted that Schwarzenegger came out the victor. "He wanted to be number one," he said. "Unfortunately, he got there."
However, Schwarzenegger noted that he potentially wouldn't have been as hard-working had he not been going up against such a worthy competitor. "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. I'm a competitive person."
The two have, of course, gone on to bridge the divide between them, sharing the screen together in multiple films, including 2013's Escape Plan and all three Expendables movies.
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