Try as he might, the great Dave Bautista will never reach the macho heights of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, two exceedingly rare actors who, despite being superhuman, excelled at playing very human characters. Still, for a spell in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the pair often resonated as cinematic superheroes, the likes of whom could never really coexist. And it’s true that, for a time at least, they shared bad blood. They’ve since made nice, however, and even co-starred together in movies like The Expendables and Escape Plan. As the below clip demonstrates, however, the pair still enjoy poking fun at each other.
It appears that Stallone signed a knife used in a Rambo film for charity, but when Schwarzenegger thanks him for it, he can’t help flaunt his own signed blade, which is, well, you get it. “This is not a knife,” he says, adopting his best (read: hilariously bad) Paul Hogan impression, “this is a knife!” Arnold reveals his knife was used on the set of Predator, and, with a shit-eating schoolboy grin on his face, notes that “it’s just a little larger than yours.” Arnold, you cad.
Stallone took it in stride, but not without playing along. “Thank you very much big man,” he wrote on Instagram. “You’re a great friend, and a great star, but my knife is always going to be sharper than yours!”
Considering the innate physical competitiveness that’s always circled the men, who both came up in an era of masculine oneupmanship, it’s only natural that any conversation about anything even remotely phallus-shaped would devolve into dick jokes. ‘Twas ever thus.
Anyways, Stallone just opened Rambo: Last Blood, which, despite its critical drubbing, is still drawing in crowds. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, is also in the business of prolonging his older hits, starring in the upcoming Terminator: Dark Fate as a cyborg assassin who, uh, grew a beard and chops wood now? Sure!