Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone break down how they transformed a heated rivalry as the top action stars of their era into a lifelong friendship on Fox’s new special ‘TMZ Presents: Arnold & Sly: Rivals, Friends, Icons.’
Back in the days of box office superstars, there were not two names bigger among action movie aficionados than Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. The two actors butted heads at the box office and behind-the-scenes with one of Hollywood’s most intense rivalries.
Years later, those fires “in the belly” have faded, leaving a mutual respect and long-lasting friendship that’s fully explored in the new Fox special TMZ Presents: Arnold & Sly: Rivals, Friends & Icons.
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One of the things that obviously changed for both men was when they transitioned from young, single, ripped movie stars to married fathers raising up young children of their own.
As emphasized in this exclusive clip, their children experienced a very different upbringing than their famous fathers.
Scharzenegger talked about how he didn’t believe either of their children shared that same kind of insatiable hunger that they did, believing it had to do with their harder upbringing.
“That only comes with that upbringing, you know, your urge to move away to go and explode and get out of there because you get the beating all the time there,” he explained. “So that hunger, I think, would not be the case with our kids.”
While heaping praise on his ex-wife Maria Shriver for carrying the lion’s share of the load in raising their children, Schwarzenegger did share one anecdote that got laughs out of Stallone and TMZ founder Harvey Levin.
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“She did an extraordinary job with their education, with their moral codes and with all of those kind of things,” Schwarzenegger said. “My kids all had to wash their own clothes, they all had to wash their own bedwear.”
“And every so often, when I saw them cheating and someone else did it, I grabbed their mattresses and I threw it off the balcony of their bedroom,” he shared, with Stallone laughing, “Here we go!”
His kids were then left having to drag their mattress back into the house and upstairs to remake their bed. Hilariously, it turns out Schwarzenegger would do this not just when he knew someone else had made the bed, but when he “detected they didn’t make the bed” because “it was too nicely made.”
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How long do we think it took before the kids made sure to do a slightly sloppy job on making their beds — or whoever they nabbed to do it for them?!
The action icons talk all about their rivalry, from counting bodies in their respective films to the lengths they would go to sabotage one another’s careers — including the time Schwarzenegger tricked Stallone into signing on for a career-defining dud!
“He punked you!” Levin says in the trailer for tonight’s special.
Find out all the details of when that fire was burning hot, and how it cooled into a respect and friendship that’s lasted years, when TMZ Presents: Arnold & Sly: Rivals, Friends, Icons premieres tonight at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.
