Story by Lauren Morris
Sylvester Stallone has said that his rivalry with fellow action star Arnold Schwarzenegger was like “life and death” for him, revealing that the pair were “at each other’s throats”.
The Hollywood stars have been open about their 20-year feud in the past, with the two leading men having often competed for the same roles in the Eighties and regularly hurled insults at one another in the press.
While the stars are friends now, Rocky star Stallone has shared new insights into the famous feud – drawing parallels between their rivalry and Elon Musk’s legal battle with his own electric car company Tesla. Last December, the Delaware supreme court reinstated Musk’s $55bn compensation pay package after years of the CEO arguing with the Tesla over the amount.
Stallone in ‘Rambo’, around the time he began feuding with Schwarzenegger
Speaking to The Sunday Times Magazine, Stallone said that Musk had “an impureness to him”, adding: “You see that when he was going against Tesla, there’s a ferocity there. A mortal enemy.”
After pausing, he continued: “I was the same with [Arnold] Schwarzenegger. We were at each other’s throats, big time. It wasn’t a joke. It was like life and death. We should have been together in the Roman Colosseum.
“It’s like when one fighter insults the other, he’s going to train so much to put a beating on the other. We needed each other, absolutely.”
The pair’s feud began in 1985, after Schwarzenegger rose to fame in Terminator and Commando, while Stallone had starred in Rambo: First Blood II. Stallone even admitted in 2022 that Schwarzenegger would trick him into taking on dud roles by pretending to want the film for himself.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone have since become friends (Getty)
“He’s quite clever. He goes around town saying, ‘I can’t wait to do this film…’ I go to my agent, ‘Get that thing away from him. Get people options on me,’” he told The Jonathan Ross Show at the time. “I got it and I said, ‘What a piece of s*** this is.’ [Schwarzenegger] goes, ‘Ha ha ha!’”
In 2022, Stallone recalled how the rivalry between him and Schwarzanegger was so extreme at one point, they “couldn’t stand to be in the same galaxy together for a whole”.
“We truly, loathed each other,” he also told The Jonathan Ross Show.
The pair eventually buried the hatchet after 20 years and went on to star in four films together: The Expendables, The Expendables 2, The Expendables 3 and Escape Plan.
In 2023, Stallone appeared in the Netflix documentary about Schwarzenegger’s life, admitting that the True Lies star had the edge on him when they were competing for film roles. “He was superior. He just had all the answers,” he said. “He had the body. He had the strength. That was his character.”
