Sylvester Stallone said Arnold Schwarzenegger is the “superior” action star even after years of animosity and competition between the two celebrities.
“The ’80s was a very interesting time because the definitive ‘action guy’ had not really been formed yet,” Stallone said in the newly released Netflix documentary “Arnold,” per IndieWire. “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.”
Stallone went on to say that Schwarzenegger was one of the first actors to make action movies more focused on the actor rather than the project.
“You actually relied upon your body to tell the story,” the “Rocky” lead 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,” Stallone said of their different on-screen personas. “And I’m going, ‘Arnold, you could go out and fight a dragon and you’d come back with a Band-Aid.’”
Schwarzenegger was equally complimentary toward his contemporary. “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,” the Austrian-born actor said.
Stallone told Forbes last November that he and Schwarzenegger “really disliked each other immensely” in the 80s and continuously for two decades as their action films were always competing.
“We were… this may sound a little vain, but I think we were pioneering a kind of genre at that time and it hasn’t been seen since really,” Stallone told the publication. “So the competition, because it’s his nature, he is very competitive and so am I… and I just thought it actually helped, but off-screen we were still competitive and that was not a healthy thing at all, but we’ve become really good friends.”