Sylvester Stallone crowned arnold schwarzenegger as the “top” action star, less than a year after openly admitting that the two actors hated each other during the 1980s, when Hollywood was pitting their acting careers against each other. In the documentary of Netflix from recently released Schwarzenegger “Arnold”Stallone says that there is no doubt that Schwarzenegger was the most ideal action hero.
“The ’80s were a very interesting time because the ultimate ‘action guy’ hadn’t been formed yet,” Stallone said. “Until then, the action was a car chase like ‘Bullitt’ or ‘The French Connection.’ A movie about intellect and innuendo and verbal this and verbal that.”
Stallone credited Schwarzenegger with making action movies more reliant on the actor.
“You actually trusted 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 another guy from Austria, who doesn’t need to say much… It was superior. He just had all the answers. She had the body. He had the strength. that was his character”.
“I had to constantly kick my butt, while Arnold never got hurt much,” Stallone added of their differences in their action hero personas. “And I said, ‘Arnold, you could go out and fight a dragon and you’d come back with a Band-Aid.'”
Schwarzenegger has the same praise for Stallone, saying in the documentary: “Every time I came out with a movie like ‘Rambo II,’ I had to find a way to top that. Without Stallone, maybe I wouldn’t have been as motivated in the ’80s to make the kind of movies that I did and to work as hard as I did.. I am a competitive person”.
Stallone and Schwarzenegger’s rivalry in the eighties
Stallone admitted to Forbes last November that the two actors “really disliked each other immensely” for more than two decades as their action movies competed at the box office.
“We were… this may sound a bit vain, but I think we were pioneering a kind of genre at the time and it really hasn’t been seen since,” Stallone said. “So the competition, because it’s his nature, he’s very competitive and so am I… and I thought it actually helped, but off-screen we were still competitive and that wasn’t healthy at all, but we’ve become really good friends. .”
Speaking on an episode of “The Jonathan Ross Show” around the same time, Stallone said of the pair’s rivalry: “We couldn’t stand being in the same galaxy together for a while. We really, really hated each other.”
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
