Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are buddies now. They’ve even done a movie or two together. But in the ‘80s and ‘90s they were competitors — hulking he-men duking it out for the title of king of action. Their rivalry was so heated that Schwarzenegger even tricked Stallone into making one of his most notorious movies.
Stallone sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about Tulsa King, his first leading role on a scripted TV show. Their wide-ranging chat stopped — in a bit teased out by The Daily Beast — on 1992’s Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, one of the more embarrassing parts of his filmography. The buddy comedy, which paired him with Estelle Getty, was, he said, “supposed to be like Throw Momma From the Train with the mom as this really nasty piece of work.”
Alas, Getty was “the nicest woman in Hollywood,” which might have made for a fun shoot but didn’t result in laughs. Stallone said he had heard Schwarzenegger had been interested in the movie, which prompted him to “beat him to it.” The movie was a critical and commercial punching bag, leading Stallone to opine, “I think he set me up.”
Spoiler: He did. THR reached out to Schwarzenegger, to ask if he had indeed set him up. “It’s 100 percent true,” Schwarzenegger replied. “In those days we did all kinds of crazy things to get ahead in our rivalry. Luckily for us and everyone else, today, we root for each other. Thank God, because we sure don’t ever need another Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”
The film wound up being Stallone’s second comedy bomb in a row, after the period farce Oscar, from the previous year. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, didn’t make a movie in 1992, but that’s okay: He was still riding high from 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Alas, he had the underperforming Last Action Hero on the horizon, while Stallone had a comeback hit with Cliffhanger.
Elsewhere in the interview, Stallone — who sat out the forthcoming Creed III — discusses why he’s not a comic book movie leading man (though he can do a comic book movie as a talking shark) and reveals that he turned down a hefty pay day for Rambo IV, before returning to the role nearly two decades later.
(Via THR and The Daily Beast)