Actor Sylvester Stallone has admitted that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the superior action star.
Stallone and Schwarzenegger were the titans of the action movie genre in the 1980s. Rambo and the Terminator appeared in many of the era’s films, establishing themselves as action heroes. Stallone admitted that the stars hated each other in the ’80s, with their acting careers leading to fierce competition. Their rivalry led to Schwarzenegger once tricking Stallone into appearing in a critically panned movie.
In Schwarzenegger’s new Netflix documentary miniseries, Arnold, Stallone admitted that Schwarzenegger was the superior star. “You actually relied upon your body to tell the story,” Stallone said. “Dialogue was not necessary. I saw that there was an opportunity because no one else was doing this except some other guy from Austria, who doesn’t need to say much… He was superior. 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,” said Stallone about the differences in their action hero personas. “And I’m going, ‘Arnold, you could go out and fight a dragon, and you’d come back with a Band-Aid.’”
Schwarzenegger returned the praise, admitting, “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. I’m a competitive person.”
After a while, the two stars were able to put their hate for each other aside and become friends. They would go on to appear in Escape Plan and all three Expendables movies together. Sylvester Stallone can be seen in “Tulsa King” on Paramount+ and Expendables 4 later this year. Arnold Schwarzenegger can be seen in his new Netflix series Fubar.
