Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were once longstanding rivals — and are now rehashing what started the drama in the first place.
“I mean, as soon as I saw him, it was, like, bang, two alphas hitting,” Stallone, 79, recalled during a joint TMZ sit-down on Wednesday, November 5. “If we walked into a party, we’d be staring at each other for a few seconds, and then, ‘I gotta get that guy. He didn’t do anything wrong, but he will.’”
Schwarzenegger, 78, and Stallone’s rivalry initially began over their respective early careers as action stars.
“There’s not that much room up [at the top]. Everyone wants to be on the point,” Stallone said. “I think it’s something you’re born with. I would go out for parts I knew I was wrong for, but I wanted them so bad.”
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According to Stallone, Schwarzenegger was a motivating factor to book roles.
“Dare I say it, he was a competition or threat, whatever word you want to use,” he said.
Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, admitted that he kickstarted the feud by “opening up [his] mouth” and “saying stupid things.”
“Rocky came out, and I was blown away by his acting and the movie,” Schwarzenegger recalled. “Then, after we were at the Golden Globes and we both won.”
During the 1977 ceremony, Stallone even threw a bouquet of flowers at Schwarzenegger.
“I’m going, ‘He won Best Newcomer?’ No offense, but Rocky was a pretty good debut, and he’s looking pretty proud of himself,” Stallone said. “I didn’t think we were going to win Best Picture. We win, and I lost it. I literally went and picked up this entire bouquet of flowers and tossed them straight up in the air, sort of aiming toward his side of the table. He’s sitting there, like, ‘OK, he just threw down the gauntlet.’”
Schwarzenegger concurred, adding that he saw the floral toss as “the beginning of a battle.”
“It just developed from then on,” Schwarzenegger said. “Now, I had to chase him. He did Rocky 2 and the Rocky 3 and all these movies and it kept going up and up. My salary was 10 percent of his. When he got $2 million, I got $200,000. … I had to chase behind him, and I said, ‘This has to stop.’”
While Schwarzenegger admitted that he didn’t “boycott” any of Stallone’s acclaimed films at the time, he did use it as a motivator to work even harder to get the same type of roles and income.
“I had to kind of catch up to that,” he said. “It gave me motivation, and this is what the whole thing was about. It became very, very competitive.”
Eventually, the dust settled between Schwarzenegger and Stallone, allowing the two actors to form a friendship.
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“[I admire] his dedication and his passion. I wish I could be as passionate as he is,” Schwarzenegger gushed. “He’s so passionate. When you talk about scripts or when you talk about your characters that you play in movies or when you talk about movies, there’s just so much passion there. It’s really unbelievable.”
Stallone, for his part, is equally in awe of his friend.
“He’s rock steady. He’s like a season that doesn’t change,” Stallone said about Schwarzenegger. “He’s, like, bang-on, very organized, very calculating and very thoughtful. I’m not. I’m very emotional, I tend to be swayed [which] can upset logic quite often, and that’s when you make mistakes. … I don’t know what’s going on, but he gets it done and really does have a big heart.”
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