Arnold Schwarzenegger Opens Up On Past Rivalry With Sylvester Stallone

Arnold Schwarzenegger, accompanied by Top Gun: Maverick standout Monica Barbaro, was in his element during our interview promoting his new Netflix
NFLX
series FUBAR, premiering May 25. The former California governor harnessed the nostalgia from his game-changing action films of the 80s and 90s that FUBAR effectively utilizes.

There was a worthy adversary that commanded Schwarzenegger’s attention and became a target of his gamesmanship during the actor’s heyday, Sylvester Stallone.

MORE FROM FORBESSylvester Stallone Opens Up On Competing With Arnold Schwarzenegger In Their HeydayBy Scott King

This past November, while promoting Tulsa King, Stallone made headlines after describing the rivalry to me:

We really disliked each other immensely because 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. 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.

The Rocky star also mentioned on Britain’s The Jonathan Ross Show in November that the competition became so intense that at one point, Arnold tricked him into doing 1992’s less than stellar flick Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. According to Stallone, Schwarzenegger spread the word around Hollywood that he was very excited to do the film, leaving Sylvester to think taking it from him would be a victory.

Arnold confirmed the tactic in our conversation last week.

“Yeah, yeah. I mean, we would do anything to derail each other,” Schwarzenegger told me. “And it was all kind of in the spirit of competition. He’s a very competitive person, so am I. So when you compete, competition creates performance.

“We both look at those years and say it was good we had that competition because I went all out to outdo him and he went all out to outdo me. So it kind of drove up our performances and our box office success and the kind of audience we’ve created.

“We really kind of created that action genre, when people talk about the 80s action genre, we both did that. There were some other guys like (Jean-Claude) Van Damme and (Dolph) Lundgren, so they were really fantastic but I mean, it was really us that started that.

“And it never meant that we didn’t have the utmost respect for one another. Remember that Sly had a lot of respect for me and my movies and so did I for his performances and his talent and his movies.

“But, he just saw me as the enemy just in his own little vision and I saw him as the enemy and I had to get rid of him and he had to get rid of me and that was it. Then in the 90s, we came together and said this is silly, let’s just all work together and we became really good friends.”

In FUBAR, Schwarzenegger plays Barbaro’s father, a CIA agent closing in on retirement only to unearth a family secret that requires him to stay in the field a bit longer than he anticipated. The chemistry, or perhaps tension, makes for memorable comedic and dramatic exchanges between the duo.

Arnold and Monica met a couple years before filming the show when it was getting pitched.

“We just had a great chat immediately and somewhat kept in touch and by the time we were filming, I think we kind of felt like we knew each other,” Barbaro recalled. “By the time we were filming we were comfortable giving each other a hard time, that’s when you know you really get along with someone and can work with them.”

Schwarzenegger felt the on-screen relationship worked as the pair were able to draw from their own relationship experience.

“For me, the way I feel is, she has a dad and I have daughters, so we know what those relationships are like in real life,” Arnold stated. “And sometimes in a TV series like FUBAR, you kind of exaggerate those things a little bit and kind of put it over the top.

“The performances are over the top, the drama is over the top, and [it’s] also very funny at the same time, there’s a lot of comedy in there, and all the action and the drama and all this stuff. … We really had a lot of fun doing that, as much as we argued and as much as we fought (on the show), but it was very funny. It was just so well-written like Monica says. It was so well-written that we just had to laugh when we rehearsed, about how feisty the relationship became and so on.”

The actors’ rapport soon crystalized even more during the interview. After the previous response by the action superstar, Monica’s dog Auggie, short for Augustus, darted past the junket cameras and in front of their feet, bringing the interview in a different direction, momentarily.

“I’m so sorry, my dog is here and Arnold feeds him. This was another dynamic on set,” Barbaro said in hysterics. “Arnold feeds him constantly, he would just toss schnitzel at him.”

The Terminator actor was now on defense.

“Just so you know, I gave this dog one time schnitzel … and she now blames me for every bad behavior of this dog since then. This has now been going on for nine months.”

Monica then said Arnold gave Auggie a croissant he was eating before that day’s junket interviews only for Schwarzenegger to respond that it wasn’t his fault and allege that the dog peed on his cowboy boots. Monica denied that allegation.

Following the series of events, it seemed like a good time to ask about FUBAR’s use of comedy.

“It’s very dark comedy. There’s a lot of comedic moments and some very violent pieces, which I think is also… we build a lot of tension and when you release it with a great comedic line it’s very satisfying,” Barbaro responded.

“We just had a lot of fun doing it. Jay Baruchel and Fortune Feimster are so funny. Adam Pally does a great guest spot in this, I think it was also very helpful to have such a funny cast around us. So I think a combination of the writing and the cast and us being goofballs, as you now know, I think lent itself to a lot of fun.”

Arnold was quick to praise FUBAR’s unique blend of comedy, drama, and action, giving the writers full marks for their approach to crafting the series.

“Very fortunate that they took a movie like True Lies, which was one of the most successful action movies ever, and to take that concept of combining action, drama, and comedy and make that a TV series, I think was a brilliant idea and as soon as I heard about it, I said, ‘I’m in. Send me the first 20 pages and I will sign off on it,’” he said.

“I read the first 20 pages and I said, ‘Oh yeah, this is exactly like True Lies. This is fantastic.’ The dynamics were there and it was just a brilliant idea of playing this action star, this CIA agent that is really the best in the field but when he comes home, he’s just like everyone else.

“We all have the same troubles with the wife, kids, and the house, and the financial situation, all of this kind of stuff. So that’s what makes it really funny then.”

I couldn’t part with the Last Action Hero himself without asking about the action film that elevated expectations for every movie in the genre that succeeded it, Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

So, did the former seven-time Mr. Olympia know while filming T2 that it would profoundly impact the action genre forever?

“When you go into a project there’s a few things that you do know. I knew that it was going to be a successful movie, I knew that Jim Cameron is a brilliant director and brilliant writer, I knew that this idea of changing me from my evil machine to a life-saving machine I thought was a brilliant kind of change in the script. But the rest of it, we did not know,” Schwarzenegger said.

“We did not know if this was going to be the most successful movie financially of the year, we didn’t know that we were going to get such great reviews and that it would create a whole new genre of action movies and to raise the bar that high that even today they’re still trying to imitate some of the visual effects and some of the stuff we’ve seen in that movie. That I didn’t know.

“First of all, I’m not a technology genius, so I didn’t even know what the hell Jim Cameron was up to when he was doing all of those visual effects and stuff like that. I mean, it was so sophisticated and so far out there that no one really knew.

“But I was really happy that we did it and then after that we did True Lies together and now I’ve done this TV series based on True Lies, a script written by Jim Cameron that was actually created by a French writer for a movie called La Totale!, which was a million dollar movie but had a great concept with action and comedy.”