Legendary action hero Sylvester Stallone is good friends with his former screen rival Arnold Schwarzenegger these days but that wasn’t always the case.
With the release of the recent Netflix documentary, Arnold, viewers were reminded that in the 1980s Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger had a bitter rivalry.
Although the pair are now friends, that wasn’t always the case as Sylvester, who turns 77 today and who is also getting his own Netflix documentary called Sly, revealed: “We were incredibly antagonistic. We couldn’t even stand to be in the same room. People had to separate us.”
He even went so far as to compare their feud to some other great rivalries. “We became incredibly competitive like Ali and Fraser or great warriors that travel in the same course and there was only room for one of us,” the Rambo legend said.
The rivalry actually began at the 1977 Golden Globe Awards not long after Sylvester had made his acting debut as Rocky.
The movie had been tipped to take home a number of awards at the ceremony, but on the night it kept losing to other flicks.
Arnold, who won the Best Newcomer award, was seated opposite, and took great delight in watching Sylvester lose.
Sylvester later recalled: “I’m going: ‘Who is this big guy?’ And he’s gloating and gloating [about Rocky not winning].”
Eventually, Rocky won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture at the ceremony and in a fit of excitement and fury, Sylvester picked up the first thing he saw and launched it straight at Arnold’s head.
“I managed to grab this giant bowl of flowers,” Sylvester remembered. “And heaved it in his direction.
“It had lilies and tulips… It began a 10-year battle royale. And I thought: ‘The gauntlet is down.'”
It’s a far cry from recent times where the pair have starred in movies together such as The Expendables franchise and Escape Plan and even posed on Instagram carving pumpkins together last Halloween.
They finally decided to bury the hatchet, once and for all in 1990 and famously waltzed with each other at the 43rd Cannes Film Festival.
Arnold later recalled. “Up until that point, we didn’t really hit it off well. We were very competitive and trying to derail each other at every angle and every possibility.
“And then, somehow, because we were working for the same company, we hugged at a party right about here.
“The Gipsy Kings were playing and we were holding onto each other and they said, ‘Do you want to dance?’ and he says, ‘Yeah.’ And so we were dancing, we were waltzing, around and around and around.”
Just last May, Sylvester explained how they built bridges in an interview with Fortune magazine. “We came together and said this is silly, let’s just all work together and we became really good friends,” he said.
He also discussed their friendship in The Hollywood Reporter around the same time.
“Arnold’s very wise and he loves to talk about philosophies which have got him to where he is.
“It’s good to talk to a man who actually has put his money where his mouth is, and he’s achieved that. Then we start goofing around and being crazy — just laughing at the old times.
I told him: “We are the last two tyrannosaurus. We’re the last two meat eaters, and there’s not much beef left out there. So we better enjoy each other.”