Arnold Schwarzenegger has spent nearly 50 years as one of the biggest names in movies, at this point, so it can be hard to imagine that there was a time when it didn’t look like he’d be able to make his movie star dreams come true. The former bodybuilder will hit the 2025 movie schedule soon in the holiday film The Man with the Bag (He plays Santa!), and he’s opened up about how he actually made room for himself in Hollywood.
What Did Arnold Schwarzenegger Say About How He Became A Movie Star?
People can take many different roads to success, and that is also true for those who eventually become our most recognizable entertainers. Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course, turned his bodybuilding career into major movie stardom, and has been beloved for decades for some of the best action movies of all time, including the Terminator franchise, Predator, his awesome version of The Running Man, True Lies and the vastly underrated Last Action Hero.
The ‘80s/’90s action star recently sat down with GQ, and when having a wide-ranging discussion with his interviewer about the idea of manhood and where it stands now, was asked if he ever recognized that the idea of what a leading man in a movie could be had shifted to someone way less muscle-bound. The former governor thought back to the days before his own film career, and said:
When I was going from bodybuilding to the movies and I got an agent and the agent introduced me to studio executives, they said, ‘What are you talking about? You want to get into movies? You weigh 250 fucking pounds. This is the seventies! Not the sixties where they did Hercules movies. Do you understand that Woody Allen now is a sex symbol? Do you know that Dustin Hoffman is a sex symbol? Do you know Al Pacino is a sex symbol? This is the new breed. They all weigh 145 pounds. You weigh 250. There’s no room for you in the movie business.’
Honestly, seeing as how Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone vying for the title of #1 Action Movie Star defined a lot of my childhood, I’d never really thought about the timing of their rise to fame. The ‘70s didn’t exactly have blockbusters filled with big guys like the future Commando star, but actors like those he mentioned and Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman, Richard Pryor, and Jack Nicholson. Sure, some of them played tough guys, but hardly those of the beefy, beat-up-every-bad-guy variety. He continued:
But I did not feel like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to cut down to 150 or 145.’ No. I continued on with my training and I continued over with my thing because I said to myself, ‘If I make bodybuilding really popular, then people want to see bodybuilders also on the screen.’ And exactly this would happen after Pumping Iron came out, they said, ‘Oh, this guy has a personality. I think he could act. Let’s go and tie up the Conan rights.’
Wait…is he saying that if all writers band together and make writing cool, that we, too, could be (gulp) movie stars? OK, maybe not, but his point of sticking with what he was doing and showing the powers that be that audiences would buy-in still stands. And, it’s clear that it worked for him, as he added:
And then all of a sudden they started developing Conan and then they asked me to do movies like Stay Hungry, which had bodybuilding in there. And then they asked me to do the Streets of San Francisco, which had crazy bodybuilding in there. As soon as I could show my talent, they started dusting off all these old scripts.
Dust off, indeed. Not only that, but it wasn’t long before the Conan the Barbarian star was one of the biggest names in the movie business, and people began crafting films with the hope that he would agree to star. He noted:
And then bang, I broke through. And so I did not shy away from the muscles. I did not go say, ‘Oh my God, I missed the time, the right decade, what should I do now?’ What do I care about the new look? We are going to be around for decades. So we are going to go through cycles, yes, but I don’t have to be the follower. I’m going to be a leader.
Wow. Schwarzenegger makes movie stardom sound so easy, doesn’t he? I suppose that very ability is exactly why he made it to the top and stayed there for so long that his fans are now in middle-age and have fond memories of his films from their childhood.