Arnold Schwarzenegger Admits ‘Extreme’ Rivalry With Sylvester Stallone ‘Got Out of Control and We Tried to Derail Each Other’

variety.com:

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted on a new episode of “The Graham Norton Show” (via NME) that his rivalry with Sylvester Stallone “got out of control” during the 1980s and ’90s.

The two actors emerged as action movie icons around the same time that Schwarzenegger released “The Terminator” and Stallone starred in “Rambo.” “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 continued. “He is a great human being and we are now inseparable.” Stallone and Schwarzenegger would go on to star opposite each other in the first two “Expendables” movies and the 2013 action movie “Escape Plan,” which grossed $137 million worldwide.

The latter film led to two sequels, both of which starred Stallone. In Schwarzenegger’s Netflix documentary “Arnold,” which debuted over the summer, Stallone said there’s no question that Schwarzenegger was the more ideal action hero. “The ’80s was a very interesting time because the definitive ‘action guy’ had not really been formed yet,” Stallone said.

Up until that time, action was a car chase like ‘Bullitt’ or ‘The French Connection.’ A film all about intellect and innuendo and verbal this and verbal that. [Arnold] actually relied upon [his] body to tell the story.