Arnold Schwarzenegger says his rivalry with Sylvester Stallone got out of control

The rivalry between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone is legendary, with the action icons attempting to one-up each other throughout the ’80s and ’90s, but Schwarzenegger now admits that it got a little out of control.

Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared on a new episode of The Graham Norton Show (via NME) and explained his epic rivalry with Sylvester Stallone. “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. Then, when we both invested in Planet Hollywood, we started flying around the world together to promote it, and we became fantastic friends. He is a great human being, and we are now inseparable.”

My favourite tale to emerge from the Schwarzenegger-Stallone rivalry is how Schwarzenegger tricked Stallone into starring in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. After reading the script, Schwarzenegger knew it was a stinker but nonetheless expressed interest in starring in it. Once Stallone caught wind, he relentlessly pursued the role in order to steal it from Schwarzenegger and the result was one of the worst movies he ever made.

While speaking to Forbes last November, Stallone said that the two stars “really disliked each other immensely” during their rivalry. “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.“

Without that rivalry pushing them to greater heights, who knows if we would have gotten some of the action classics the pair starred in over the decades.