Arnold Schwarzenegger Talks Twins Sequel, Almost Turning Down The Terminator
Arnold Schwarzenegger is ready to revisit Twins. During a visit to Sirius XM’s The Howard Stern Show this morning, the Terminator Genisys star confirmed he’s on board for the sequel to his 1988 comedy, which starred Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as unlikely twin brothers.
“Now we are talking about a sequel, where we find out at the funeral of our mother, when we read the will, that there’s three of us,” Schwarzenegger explained to Stern. The third brother? Eddie Murphy.
- Arnold hits London on a Boris bike
- Watch Arnie prank tourists
- Patrick Schwarzenegger lands first lead
“Eddie Murphy loves the idea,” Schwarzenegger gushed. “Danny DeVito and I had lunch with Eddie Murphy over at my house, and talked about the thing, and we were laughing and laughing the whole meal through because it was such a funny idea.” (Listen to the clip here.)
According to the actor, all three stars are ready to make Triplets; they’re just waiting on the screenwriters (Frozen star Josh Gad and Ryan Dixon) for some “fine-tuning.”
During the conversation with Stern, Schwarzenegger also revisited another of his biggest ‘80s hits: The original Terminator. The Austrian actor confessed that he wanted to play human hero Kyle Reese, and rejected the role of the cyborg assassin when director James Cameron first offered it to him.
“I said, ‘No no no Jim. I counted the amount of lines this guy says. It’s 27 lines. In Conan [the Barbarian] I had 128 lines. So I’m not going to go backwards,’” Schwarzenegger recalled. “I said… I want to be the leading man. He said, ‘I will make this guy the leading man! It’s called The Terminator! I will shoot it from below up, you will look heroic. And don’t worry about killing all those people — because you’re a machine. No one is going to blame Arnold.’”
Obviously, Arnold didn’t regret taking the role. But he got into a big argument with Cameron over what would become his most iconic line: “I’ll be back.”
“I said, ‘A machine would not abbreviate ‘I’ll.’ Plus it sounds really weird when I say it. ‘I’ll.’ It sounds weak,’” Schwarzenegger told the director. “I said, ‘Why don’t we say ‘I will be back?’”
But Cameron was adamant, and after a shouting match, Schwarzenegger agreed to say the line as written. “He maybe knew it’s going to be one of those powerful lines,” he told Stern. “I didn’t know. I didn’t see anything in it. I was amazed when we had the screening of the movie, and then kids came up to me and said ‘Say the line ‘I’ll be back!’”
In addition to his film career, Schwarzenegger opened up a bit to Stern about his personal life — specifically, his separation from Maria Shriver, which took place after he admitted in 2011 that he fathered a child with the family’s housekeeper 14 years earlier. The actor told Stern that he and Shriver did go to therapy, but said it was “the biggest mistake I ever made.”
“That guy was so full of s—, I have to tell you,” Schwarzenegger said of the therapist. “He said more crap and more nonsense. It was absolutely and totally counterproductive to our future relationship or to any hope to get together or anything like that.”
Schwarzenegger said that his relationship with his family is now fantastic. At the Terminator Genisys premiere in Berlin, Shriver and their four children surprised him by filling his room with balloons. “There was a note: you’re the greatest dad, you’re the greatest man, you’re the greatest this, we love you Dad, this kind of stuff — so it made me feel really so good,” he told Stern.
