Arnold Schwarzenegger Was Better Action Star

“He had the body. He had the strength”

Sylvester Stallone has credited Arnold Schwarzenegger for redefining action movies and crowned his formal rival as being the “superior” actor in the genre.

“The ’80s was a very interesting time because the definitive ‘action guy’ had not really been formed yet,” Stallone said in the new Netflix docuseries Arnold (via IndieWire). “Up until that time, action was a car chase like Bullitt or The French Connection. A film all about intellect and innuendo and verbal this and verbal that.”

Stallone went on to praise Schwarzenegger for changing the landscape of action movies by bringing a physical presence that the films could center around. “You actually relied upon your body to tell the story,” he said. “Dialogue was not necessary. 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.”

Besides giving him an impressive look, Schwarzenegger’s muscular build also protected him while filming on set. “I had to get my ass kicked constantly, whereas Arnold, he never got hurt much,” Stallone explained. “And I’m going, ‘Arnold, you could go out and fight a dragon and you’d come back with a Band-Aid.’”

For his part, Schwarzenegger said Stallone’s own work pushed him to do better with every film. “Every time he came out with a movie like Rambo II, I had to figure out a way of now outdoing that,” he stated. “Without Stallone, I maybe wouldn’t have been as motivated in the ’80s to do the kind of movies that I did and to work as hard as I did. I’m a competitive person.”

Last November, Stallone told Forbes that he and Schwarzenegger “disliked each other immensely” in their ’80s heyday while “pioneering” the action movie genre. However, they’ve become “really good friends” since then and starred in the first two Expendables movies and 2013’s Escape Plan together.

Schwarzenegger’s first TV series, FUBAR, recently debuted on Netflix. Stallone just starred as Stakar Ogord in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and is currently in post-production with Expend4bles.