“I only know one thing in Italian: Ti acchiapp’alla tie,” says Arnold Schwarzenegger when he learns that the interviewer is Italian. This is followed by laughter and an emphatic “Ehh” to simulate our country’s accent. It’s a strange sentence. Where did he learn it? “I lived with my Italian friend Franco Columbu, who was a champion bodybuilder. Sardinian. He always said he’d catch you by the tie.” “It means I’m going to grab you by the neck,” Schwarzenegger explains, turning to Monica Barbaro, co-star of the new Netflix series Fubar (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair), who is sitting next to him during our video interview. And she bursts out laughing too.
The beginnings as a bricklayer
Arnold came to Santa Monica from Austria in the late 1960s at the age of 21 and shared a one-bedroom apartment with Franco at 227 Strand Street for a year. They earned their living as bricklayers. “It’s one of those crazy things he used to say, I remember it now,” the actor continues, with a touch of nostalgia for his friend, who died of a heart attack in 2019. “I only know Italian: I will.” Break your face,” intervenes Monica, an Italian-American. “Unfortunately, we only know violent phrases in Italian…” he adds. But Schwarzenegger saw the potential for a comedic scene. “One thing Monica tells me,” says the actor, “that maybe you can translate for us because I’m a little confused is: pig face.” He spells it in Italian and pretends he doesn’t know what it is means. And when we translate, she pretends to be angry with her colleague: “Ah, so you called me pig face?!”.
The first TV series in Arnold’s career
Schwarzenegger, who turned 75 in July, and Barbaro, 32, previously starred in the blockbuster Top Gun: Mavericke, who was cast as Joan Baez in an upcoming Bob Dylan film directed by James Mangold and starring Timothee Chalamet Father and daughter in Fubar, the first TV series of Arnold’s career, created by Nick Santora. Your characters are both unknowing CIA agents in a tragi-comic family relationship marred by too many lies. Schwarzenegger’s character, Luke Brunner, would like to retire but can’t: there’s still one last task to complete, confronting a villain bound by past mistakes.
But has America – we ask him – become a society in which older men like Biden and Trump no longer want to give up the helm? And do you want to retire?
The actor assures us that he is very different from his character: “Fubar’s protagonist spent endless years working for the CIA and was exposed to incredible risks.” He wants to retire, cruise his boat and win back the woman who raised him left fifteen years ago. In real life, however, I will never retire. I’ll keep going until I can’t take it anymore. Because I enjoy my work. What an extraordinary joy to wake up each morning to shoot this series in Toronto for four and a half months. Episode after episode: the scenes, the action, the guns, it’s like being a kid again. Running, jumping off a three story building, driving like crazy on a motorcycle or in a car, what fun… And when you’re done, you go to an environmental conference or to an anti-hate conference. For me, life is exciting and I have no intention of retiring. Period”.
“God gave us two ears and one mouth to hear what we say twice.” “I AM INTERESTED ABOUT HOW YOUNG PEOPLE FEEL THINGS” – Schwarzenegger moved to London in 1966 to compete in the Mr. Universe competition, but one of the judges offered to train him. The following year, he won and began his bodybuilding career as a former four-time Conan Mister Universe
Schwarzenegger has experienced many things and is still everywhere. Mister Olympia (seven times), Mister Universe (four times), Conan and Terminator (with multiple sequels), married a Kennedy (Maria Shriver) and got elected governor (that’s what they called him when he was governor of California), though – a lot To his regret, he will never become President of the United States (because he was born in Austria). He recently made headlines for fixing a hole in the asphalt of a bad road in California with his own hands. At the end of April at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the coolest socio-political event in Washington, Joe Biden joked about age, his biggest problem with the electorate, and described himself as a contemporary of one of the Founding Fathers. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was chosen to open the dinner with a video message: He said he wasn’t joking, just thanking journalists as “allies of the people,” a dig at Trump, who branded them “enemies.” the human”.
His fight against anti-Semitism
CNN recently interviewed him about the fight against anti-Semitism: During the filming of “Fubar” in May 2022, the actor was awarded the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation’s Prize for Combating Hatred and in the fall he visited with his girlfriend Heather Milligan, his former girlfriend, the concentration camp physiotherapist; and nephew Patrick Knapp Schwarzenegger, whom he adopted after his brother died in a car accident while driving while drunk. From his early years in Hollywood, Arnold read about his father, Gustav, who was a police chief in Graz and a member of the Nazi Party, but only began speaking about it during the Trump presidency. After the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, he released a video that has been viewed 60 million times: “Your heroes are losers.” Support a lost cause. And believe me, I tell you, I met the original Nazis.” Horrified by the attack on Congress, he released another video with 80 million views, explaining that he was two years after the end of World War II was born in a country that had lost its democracy and to a father who was “instigated by his government’s lies” and died “shattered in body and mind”.
– For Arnold Schwarzenegger, global success came in the 1980s with films like ‘Conan the Barbarian’ and its sequel ‘Conan the Destroyer’. Drunken Dad and a message to Putin
Gustav “came home drunk once or twice a week, screamed and hit us,” explains Schwarzenegger in the video, in which he compares the night of January 6, 2021 to the Kristallnacht of 1938, “perpetrated by the relevant Nazi the proud boys». After the invasion of Ukraine, he also addressed Putin via video. And he reiterates that it is possible to change and avoid the same mistakes of the past. Don’t overinterpret Fubar: it’s an action comedy series. But the relationship between father and daughter expresses a generational incommunicability; With each interaction, it’s as if the young woman is shouting to her father, “Okay, Boomer.” “She wants to see her father as little as possible,” explains the actress, “but maybe in the end she’ll understand what I’m thinking: Your generation has had so many difficult experiences.” We’ve had a taste of it with the pandemic and we have our issues, but they’ve faced realities that I can’t even imagine. It’s not fair to disparage someone’s role because of their age. I think millennials get annoyed when ideas become too solid and don’t allow for change. But to understand the world, the older generations are a resource.”
The relationship with the daughters and the role of the baby boomer
“My dad, who has watched the show, says he snaps every time he hears me say ‘Dad!’ shout,” Monica replies when asked if the on-screen relationship with Arnold mirrors her real-life relationship. “And when he hears me say on TV, ‘You’ve never been there,’ he, who is a very ambitious person, asks anxiously, ‘Have I never been there?’ Arnold, with a unkempt gray beard, nods and plays with the big one California governor’s ring on the ring finger of his right hand. “To be honest, being on set with Monica for four and a half months made me feel like I was with my daughters. It’s the same: “Dad, you were never there.” “Oh god, you’re so old-fashioned! Why do I have to listen to you?”, “Why don’t you go to an old video store and rent a movie?”. I feel like a boomer, one of those guys who still goes around asking people for their pager numbers. And that’s how they see you, because this is a new world, the new generation is much more technologically advanced. But I learned from my children and from Monica. I’m interested in how young people see things, it’s different from how I think of them. The key is to listen to one another, because God gave us two ears and one mouth, right? So we should listen twice as much as we speak.”
– In 1984, Schwarzenegger filmed “Terminator” for director James Cameron, starting a very successful saga. A member of the Republican Party, he was elected governor of California in 2003 (pictured below), re-elected in 2006 – The Terminator’s Vulnerable Side
A few days ago, at the premiere of “Fubar” in Los Angeles, Joseph Baena, Schwarzenegger’s son with housekeeper Mildred, whose existence the actor only admitted in 2011, said it was “very cute”, the “vulnerable” and “fatherly” to see on TV. Side of Arnold, whom he closely resembles (he’s also following in his footsteps and will be starring in the action movie The Gunner with Morgan Freeman). The revelation ended his marriage to Maria Shriver, and Arnold did not appear in public for a while. He devoted himself to improving relationships with his five children. But the Terminator promised “I’ll be back,” and Schwarzenegger felt a renewed call to action during the pandemic, posting hugely popular videos of washing hands at the Los Angeles mansion where he lives with the donkey and the isolation respects lulu and the pony whiskey. He still trains at Gold’s Gym in Venice, writes the Atlantic, which dedicated a cover to him: he trains a different muscle every day of the week, conscious of the decline that, as he always said, begins after the age of 26 . Bad shoulders and knees, three heart valve surgeries. In an interview with Howard Stern, he said he wasn’t “afraid of death,” just “it makes him angry.” At 75, Conan is fragile. He confesses that he cried while watching “Avatar”. And he likes to confide, which he didn’t do when he was young and invincible.