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The 76-year-old bodybuilding champion, Hollywood star and former Governor of California is in the UK promoting his new book Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life.
And last night, Express.co.uk attended An Evening with Arnold Schwarzenegger at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
The Terminator legend shared amazing and often hilarious anecdotes from his incredible life and career in a Q&A in front of an audience of around 5000 people.
One particular highlight was hearing how the Austrian Oak and Sylvester Stallone went from 1980s action movie star rivals to becoming best friends.
Doing an exaggerated impression of Sly, Arnie remembered back to the release of Rocky and Rambo, admitting, “Stallone was always kind of ahead of me”, and how the pair would compete over their box office takings and muscular physiques.
In response to Stallone’s success, Arnold went all in for the 1985 thriller Commando. He shared: “I was training as though I was in a bodybuilding competition, even though I was out of competition at this point, because I wanted people to see a real body. It became a competition of who has less body fat? Who is more muscular on the screen? Who kills more people? Who makes more money at the box office? Who is using a bigger gun? When he got a machine gun, I got a machine gun that is only used on tanks and helicopters!
“And then it became a competition of who kills more people on the screen. He killed like 50 people, so in Commando I had to kill like 70 people. And then who killed more viciously and creatively? And this is how the completion went on. It was insane! It got to the point where it was so competitive that we started thinking about how we could derail each other.”
In the early 1990s, Arnie was sent a “sh***y” script for a movie called Stop! Or my Mom Will Shoot. Those behind the movie told him that if he didn’t want then they’d get Sly to because apparently, he wanted to do it. Cooking up a scheme Arnold said, “Tell them I’m really interested in it”, which – even though he wasn’t – made Stallone really interested in it. The Terminator star smiled gleefully: “Sly did the movie and it went right in the toilet and I was delighted about it!”
Yet it was around this period, when Arnie was looking at being a partner on the new Planet Hollywood restaurants, that he was presented with an opportunity to finally bury the hatchet.
The lawyer involved in the Planet Hollywood deal told Arnold that Stallone wouldn’t be happy if he didn’t ask him to be involved too and suggested it was a way for them both to finally end their feud and make peace. Arnie agreed and the pair instantly hit it off, becoming inseparable.
The star shared: “After that, we travelled around the world on the same plane and promoted Planet Hollywood restaurants and we became best friends. He started giving me gold watches for gifts on the plane; he’s a very generous guy. We started talking about our families, our love of painting and our love of animals together.
“Today we are best of friends and he’s very supportive no matter what I do. When I ran for Governor he was one of the first ones there at the fundraisers and was there supporting me 100 per cent.”