Sylvester Stallone Opens Up About 20-Year ‘Life and Death’ Feud With Arnold Schwarzenegger

Sylvester Stallone is reflecting on his decades-long beef with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

During an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, Stallone, 80, said that at one point, their 20-year feud seemed like a matter of “life and death.”

It wasn’t exaggerated for the cameras, either.

“We were at each other’s throats, big time. It wasn’t a joke. It was like life and death,” the Rocky alum — who has since made amends with Schwarzenegger, 79, and considers him a friend — admitted. “We should have been together in the Roman Colosseum.”

The pair’s bitter rivalry also served as a motivator, with Stallone sharing that he and Schwarzenegger used the feud to their advantage as they made their way up in the Hollywood ranks.

“It’s like when one fighter insults the other, he’s going to train so much to put a beating on the other. We needed each other, absolutely,” he added.

The feud dates all the way back to January 1977, when the action stars were both seated at the same table during the Golden Globe Awards.

Schwarzenegger was awarded Best Acting Debut for his 1976 film Stay Hungry and was reportedly bragging about the win.

The same year, Sylvester was up for several awards for Rocky, with the longtime actor telling Variety in 2017 that he saw Schwarzenegger laughing when he lost Best Actor, but it was he who got the last laugh when Rocky won Best Picture.

“Finally it was Rocky, Best Picture, I managed to grab this giant bowl of flowers and heave it in his direction, and I went, OK, the gauntlet is down,” Stallone recalled. “This began a 10-year battle royale. I mean, we couldn’t stand to be in the same galaxy.”

As for how the feud finally came to an end, Schwarzenegger told Radio Andy‘s Andy Cohen in June 2025 that it was actually their 1991 partnership in the restaurant chain Planet Hollywood that brought them together.

“We were kind of like attacking each other, doing nasty things, saying nasty things about each other and all these stupid things,” the former California governor admitted.

Schwarzenegger continued, “And then all of a sudden, I started working with Robert Earl and Keith Barish to create the Planet Hollywood franchise, and the next thing I know, I get a call from my lawyer, who was also Sly’s lawyer, and he said, ‘Arnold, is there any kind of room for Sly on Planet Hollywood?’ I said, ‘That’s actually a good idea,’ because that could bring us together, and I wanted that. At that point I had grown out of my craziness. So, sure enough, we made it work.”

The pair went on to star alongside each other in The Expendables franchise, with Stallone even weighing in during Schwarzenegger’s self-titled Netflix documentary, Arnold, in 2023, where he called the Austrian-born actor the “superior” action star.

“Dialogue was not necessary,” Stallone said of action films of the 1980s, per IndieWire. “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.”