Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life is the epitome of the American dream. Born in Thal, Austria, he began lifting weights at 15-years-old but then immigrated to the United States where he won Mr. Universe at age 20.
He won the contest seven more times and it wasn’t long before his bulging muscle physique qualified him to become a movie star, which was semi-ironic because he could barely speak English. And in the 1980’s Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone weren’t just the biggest movie stars in the world, they were also feuding rivals.
On Monday night, Schwarzenegger revealed how he tricked Stallone into doing an awful movie and the story is quite hilarious.
Austrian-born actor Arnold Schwarzenegger is quite the prankster. On the set of “Predator” he got his co-star Jesse Ventura pretty good. The story goes that Schwarzenegger coaxed the wardrobe department into changing his bicep measurements so it looked as though Ventura’s arms were one-inch larger.
An ecstatic Ventura challenged Schwarzenegger to a bicep-measuring contest where the winner would buy the other a bottle of champagne. The “Conan the Barbarian” actor grinningly accepted his proposal and, of course, Ventura lost.
That’s some A-plus manipulation. Coincidentally, later they would go on to become governors of their respective states in California and Minnesota, which only indicates just how competitive some of these guys are.
Speaking of competition, Schwarzenegger and Stallone were extremely competitive in the 1980s.
Promoting his upcoming “Terminator: Dark Fate,” Schwarzenegger revealed some wild stories on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel LIVE” about their rivalry.
When Kimmel asked about their rivalry he said, “In the ’80s, he was just a rival. It was all about who was making bigger movies, who had the bigger definition in the muscles, who had more box office success, who kills more people, who kills more people creatively, who has bigger knives, who has bigger guns. In the end I started running around with guns that were only mounted on helicopters or on tanks. It was crazy. It was all out war.”
In a vacuum, that’s an odd rivalry to be the biggest movie star in the world. But let’s be honest, Schwarzenegger was probably the bigger action star at the height of their careers. But Stallone stormed onto the scene first and has also been nominated for three Academy Awards – writing the Oscar winner for Best Picture, “Rocky.” This is something Schwarzenegger will never achieve.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s, however, Schwarzenegger decided he wanted to dabble in comedies like his co-starring role alongside Danny DeVito in “Twins” and also “Kindergarten Cop.”
Stallone desperately needed to compete with him and that’s when the prank happened.
Schwarzenegger was the first to be approached about a 1992 action comedy called “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!”
He told Kimmel, “I read the script, and it was a piece of s—t. Let’s be honest. I say to myself, I’m not going to do this movie. Then they went to Sly, and Sly called me, have they ever talked to you about doing this movie? And I said, yes, I was thinking about doing it. This is a really brilliant idea, this movie. When he heard that, because he was in competition, he said, ‘Whatever it takes, I’ll do the movie.’ And of course the movie went major into the toilet.”
It was a box office disaster and without a doubt, a low point in Stallone’s career.
That is one epic prank Schwarzenegger pulled.
It’s ironic too considering the actor who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay wasn’t able to recognize how terrible the script was, but the other who has trouble with an English accent saw exactly what it was.