Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone spent decades competing for the proverbial crown as action stars. While they’ve long patched things up, the pair took their relationship to another level this year — and carved pumpkins together for Halloween.
“Myself and my great friend Arnold, @schwarzenegger, spending time at his amazing office Carving Pumpkin Heads for Halloween with Survival Knives!!!” Stallone captioned a gourd-infused Instagram image Tuesday. “That’s what real ACTION guys do with their free time!”
Schwarzenegger, 75, later shared the image with his 22.6 million Instagram followers and wished them a “Happy Halloween.” The duo famously co-starred in “The Expendables” after Stallone, 76, wrangled up his favorite action stars for the 2010 team-up movie.
The enormous knives in the Instagram photo recalled the brutal kills and weapons found in their films, from Stallone’s “Rambo” to Schwarzenegger’s “Commando.” While they now serve as legends of action cinema, they spent entire eras bitterly feuding.
“I’m so glad we straightened out our mess because it wasn’t pretty,” Schwarzenegger said in 2017, per ABC News. “We were attacking each other in the press relentlessly. We called each other names and called out our weak points, and it was so competitive.”
Schwarzenegger added: “It became so silly that all of a sudden, it became a competition about who has the most muscular body. So I said, ’Sly, forget about that now. Because there’s only one seven-time Mr. Olympia, and it’s me!”
While Stallone couldn’t compete with that, he extended their rivalry to who had the bigger guns onscreen. Schwarzenegger said in 2017 that Stallone had the enormous knife in “Rambo” explicitly built “so it was like a sword. No one has a knife like that!”
Their competition eventually turned friendly and produced some good-natured ribbing. Schwarzenegger congratulated Stallone on his latest “Rambo” film with an Instagram video in 2019 where he praised his charitable signing of a knife — only to hilariously trounce it.
“Sly, I just saw your knife you’ve signed for charity... It’s unbelievable, look at this knife. But this is not a knife. Now, this is a knife,” Schwarzenegger said while pulling out his own. “This is what we used in ‘Predator.’ It’s just a little larger than yours, but don’t worry about it.”
Ultimately, they’ve wisely buried the hatchet — in favor of knives they can wield together.