Stallone, Schwarzenegger revive old rivalry in Cannes

Sylvester Stallone (L) and Arnold Schwarzenegger AFP FILE PHOTO

CANNES — One-time rivals Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger grabbed the opportunity of their testosterone-fuelled promotion of “Expendables 3” in Cannes to poke fun at each other in a rollicking press conference Sunday.

Sly and former California governor Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Antonio Banderas, Harrison Ford and Wesley Snipes made a spectacular entry in the French Riviera resort on board two tanks mobbed by hundreds of fans.

Stressed-looking French policemen escorted the hulking vehicles down the famed Croisette seaside promenade, pushing away people who jumped in the path of the tanks, seemingly oblivious to the very strong risk of being flattened.

Inside the luxury Carlton hotel where a press conference subsequently took place, similar chaos reigned as eager film buffs, photographers and celebrity spotters struggled to get a glimpse of the all-star — if ageing — cast of the third instalment of the successful franchise.

“We are children with arthritis,” Stallone, 67, joked in his characteristic deep, slurred voice, sitting next to Schwarzenegger in a room packed full of journalists.

Asked whether one would have liked to have played the role of the other, Stallone responded that he should have been the Terminator — Schwarzenegger’s famous role as a cyborg.

“But a Terminator doesn’t have a crooked mouth, crooked eyes nor speak with a slur, so I don’t fit. Who would pick a robot to look like me?” he asked.

Schwarzenegger, 66, then joked that he may have wanted Stallone’s role in “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot”, a widely panned 1992 cop comedy film that has a spectacularly low rating of four percent on movie review site Rotten Tomatoes.

“Didn’t you have a baby in a movie?” Stallone retorted to general hilarity, referring to 1994 comedy “Junior” in which Schwarzenegger plays a scientist who gets pregnant — a film not generally well-rated.

Wading into the famed, intense rivalry that pitted the two musclemen against each other in the 1980s and 1990s, Gibson joked that competition at the time was indeed “stiff”.

“I think we can all agree that in 2014 it’s not so stiff now,” he said, to laughs and surprised gasps.

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