Arnold Schwarzenegger managed to maintain his reputation as an action star even in his much older years. But Clint Eastwood was a significant motivator for Schwarzenegger’s continued run in the genre.
How Clint Eastwood inspired Arnold Schwarzenegger’s future career as an action star
Schwarzenegger was determined to become a blockbuster superstar at an early age, which he accomplished at the highest level. His roles in features like Predator, Terminator, and Commando helped turn him into one of Hollywood’s biggest action heroes. He felt like the movie Conan the Barbarian was when he truly cemented himself as a leading man.
“Universal Studios sold movies internationally, and Dino De Laurentiis was the biggest producer and had more awards on his shelves than you can even imagine,” he once told Buzzfeed. “You have Oliver Stone write the script and have John Milius rewrite it and then direct. Really, I felt like I had arrived.”
As he’d gotten older, however, aging didn’t temper Schwarzenegger’s interest in action movies.
“I’m not a 30-year-old action hero anymore,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “I’m now 65 years old, but I’m still doing action movies. I acknowledge that it’s a different ballgame now. I’m an older guy.”
The key was to play action movie roles that embraced his age rather than pretend he was younger. It was a valuable lesson Schwarzenegger learned from watching the Clint Eastwood film In the Line of Fire. In the flick, there was a scene where Eastwood’s character is short of breath after running.
The small sequence was big enough to leave a lasting impression on Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger would try to incorporate some of Eastwood’s own performance in his 2013 action movie The Last Stand.
“I remember how smart it was to acknowledge that because it took the curse off. No one was trying to say, ‘Isn’t he too old for this job?’ That’s what I tried to do in this film since [Eastwood] is a big idol of mine and I always like to learn from him,” he said.
Arnold Schwarzenegger once tried to get away from doing action movies
Action films were the bread and butter of Schwarzenegger’s career in the 80s. But soon he wanted to do something different.
“It was very clear that I’ve arrived in a movie where I have to rely 50% on my body and 50% on my acting,” he said. “The trick really was how do I slowly switch to 60/40, 70/30.”
He saw Terminator as the first film that didn’t concern itself with showing off Schwarzenegger’s physique. But Schwarzenegger was still being inundated with scripts that were a bit too similar.
“Action, heroic, kick-ass — one script would be 78 kills and the other would be maybe 54 kills, but it was all the same kind of thing. It was often ripping off the shirt and showing the muscles to make sure that they understand that yeah, I am the real true action hero,” he said.
Through a conversation with producer and director Ivan Reitman, Schwarzenegger was advised to do a comedy to break away from the action stereotype. Because of this, he did the Reitman-directed project Twins with Danny Devito.
“I have a funny side of me, and also this innocent side,” he said. “I was not able to show on a screen because of the way action movies are written — it’s much more one-dimensional. The rhythm of a comedy is quite different; the way you talk is different than in an action movie,” he said.
Twins wasn’t the only comedy film he did. Schwarzenegger filled his filmography with movies like Jingle all the Way, Kindergarten Cop, and Junior which all contained heavy comedic elements.
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