Sylvester Stallone Got Into 'Physical' Altercation With Richard Gere on 'The Lords of Flatbush' Set: 'His Fingernails Dug Into My Skin'

Sylvester Stallone recalled getting into a "physical" altercation with Richard Gere.

Stallone opened up about their decades-long feud, sparked on the set of The Lords of Flatbush, in his new memoir, The Steps, which came out on September 29.

The 80-year-old actor revealed he and Gere had tension dating back to their auditions for the film, which was also when he first met Robert De Niro.

"I remember everything went pretty well initially with me and De Niro,” Stallone explained. “We were trying to outtalk each other. I enjoyed improvisation and the process of ad-libbing."

However, Stallone didn't have quite so much fun attempting to get something off the ground with Gere, 77.

"Then the improvs with Richard Gere went bad, when Gere grabbed my T-shirt and his fingernails dug into my skin," he continued. "I told him to back off, but he did it again on the second take. He couldn’t have known, but Gere had begun to stir the emotional cauldron inside me."

Stallone didn't take well to Gere's rough-and-tumble improvisation and looked to the film's director to ask if he could take their improvisation up a notch.

“I turned to Stephen Verona and asked him, ‘Is it okay if I ad-lib here and react the way I would actually react if someone did that to me in real life?’” he wrote. “‘What would you do?’ ‘Do? I’d knock his teeth out.’ ‘Please don’t.’”

Their tension only grew during the rehearsal process, mounting in a heated exchange while the cast of the 1974 drama was taking a lunch break.

Stallone warned Gere not to make a mess while they ate in a parked car on set, but revealed in his memoir that the Pretty Woman actor ignored his words.

"That thing is going to drip on me,” Stallone remembered warning him, to which Gere replied: “Don’t worry about it.”

“A stream of chicken grease spilled off the foil paper onto my leg,” he described in the book. “I elbowed him across the chest, got out of the car, came around to his side, and pulled him out of the back seat."

As Stallone geared up to strike a terrified Gere, the star pleaded with him.

"‘Hey, man, I don’t want to get physical,’ Gere said in a thin voice," Stallone added. "‘Too late ...’ Stephen Verona put himself in front of Gere. It was clear to everyone that this wasn’t working. One of us had to go."

Gere was fired and De Niro, too, left the project to pursue another movie. The actors were replaced by Perry King and Henry Winkler.

However, their bitter feud didn't stop there. According to Elton John's 2019 memoir, they almost got physical again at one of his parties in a heated dispute over Princess Diana.

“I couldn’t help notice a strange atmosphere in the room. Judging by the kind of looks he kept shooting them, Diana and Richard Gere’s newly blossoming friendship was not going down well with Sylvester Stallone at all,” he recalled. “I think he may have turned up to the party with the express intention of picking Diana up, only to find his plans for the evening ruined."