Arnold Schwarzenegger has discussed how he was “hurt” by his first action blockbuster flop with Last Action Hero.
The 1993 film saw Schwarzenegger star as Jack Slater, who bonds with a grieving young fan (Austin O’Brien) after receiving a golden ticket that transports him into an action film.
The film didn’t perform at the box office though, and the actor discussed the feeling of the failure in a new Netflix docu-series about his life.
“When Last Action Hero came out I had reached my peak after Terminator 2, having the most successful movie of the year worldwide,” Schwarzenegger remembered.
“I cannot tell you how upset that I was,” he added of the critical panning the film received. “It hurts you. It hurts your feelings. It’s embarrassing.”
After the film opened, Terminator director James Cameron phoned Schwarzenegger to console him, recalling: “He sounded like he was in bed crying. He took it as a deep blow to his brand. I think it really shook him.”
“I said, ‘What are you gonna do?'” the director asked the star. “He said, ‘I’m just gonna hang out by myself.’ That’s the only time I’ve ever heard him down.”
Schwarzenegger recalled: “I didn’t want to see anyone for a week. But you keep plodding along. And my mother-in-law also said this all the time: ‘Let’s just move forward.’ It’s a great message.”
Arnold covers Schwarzenegger’s acting and political career, featuring interviews with friends and co-stars. In the series, which premiered yesterday (June 7), he also discusses his “tough” childhood, calling his father, who was a Nazi party official, a “tyrant”.
Speaking about his father, he says he suspected he had many mental health issues. “He was buried underneath buildings, rubble, for three days, and on top of that, they lost the war. They went home so depressed,” he explained. “Austria was a country of broken men. I think there were times where my father really struggled.”
The docu-series also saw the actor address past groping allegations.
Five days prior to the California governor election in 2003, which Schwarzenegger went onto win, the actor and politician was accused of groping by six women across three decades in a report published on the Los Angeles Times. At the time, Schwarzenegger dismissed the allegations before later admitting he had “behaved badly” on film sets. “It is true that I was on rowdy movie sets and I have done things that were not right which I thought then was playful,” the actor said (via the Guardian).
“But now I recognise that I offended people,” he added. “Those people that I have offended. I want to say to them I am deeply sorry about that and I apologise because that’s not what I’m trying to do.”
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