Arnold Schwarzenegger admits the depths he’d sink to in his rivalry with Sylvester Stallone.
Whilst they are good friends now, there was a time when Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were fierce rivals. As well as their surface, public rivalry, it would appear that the Austrian Oak also sometimes employed more stealth-like tactics in their ongoing battle.
Arnold recounted one of the little tricks he played on Sly when he recently told an audience at Beyond Fest (via SlashFilm) that he was in fact responsible for Stallone accepting the role in one of his biggest duds, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992);
“I read the script. It was so bad. You know, I’ve also done some movies that went right in the toilet, right? That were bad. But this was really bad. So I went in — this was during our war — I said to myself, I’m going to leak out that I have tremendous interest. I know the way it works in Hollywood. I would then ask for a lot of money. So then they’d say, ‘Let’s go give it to Sly. Maybe we can get him for cheaper.’ So they told Sly, ‘Schwarzenegger’s interested. Here’s the press clippings. He’s talked about that. If you want to grab that one away from him, that is available.’ And he went for it! He totally went for it. A week later, I heard about it, ‘Sly is signing now to do this movie.’ And I said, [pumps fist] ‘Yes!”
The two actors did of course have an eventual collaboration of sorts with their Planet Hollywood restaurant chain, but for the longest time during the ‘80s and ‘90s, Action movie fans could only dream that they’d ever see them both on screen together. Eventually as their star power dwindled, the two actors would later go on to star alongside each other in The Expendables films and Escape Plan.
No word from Stallone on whether he’d cleverly let it slip about being up for the role of Mr Freeze in Batman & Robin but we wouldn’t be against it!