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"I was extremely happy as a body builder," Schwarzenegger says. "I was competing, training, doing seminars all over the world, winning the top trophies. The first time is the best. Fabulous! Even the second and third time, rubbing it in, letting them know you are here to stay. But then, all of a sudden -- zap! -- it is not enough anymore to make you happy. You say to yourself, 'Now what? I know that I don't have anything much better to do, but I am going to quit.' I wanted to go again for discomfort, to create the old hunger, to get into acting. Because I knew it was going to happen."
By now the reader knows not to raise a skeptical eyebrow when Arnold says something is going to happen. At the time, though, it was as hard to imagine him fitting into mainstream films as it would be to fit his wonderfully preposterous name on a movie marquee. Even after he scored a worldwide hit in his first starring role, as a primeval pillager in Conan the Barbarian, he was still seen as a fluke or a freak. Could this slab of sirloin beefcake act? It hardly mattered. He could fill the film frame superbly. He was also lucky. With the box-office triumph of Star Wars, Hollywood was back in the action- fantasy business. And with producers spending millions on optical gadgetry, Arnold was a bargain: here was a star whose body was its own stunning special effect. Eventually, smart moviemakers figured out how to carve a narrative niche sturdy enough for him to occupy.
The Terminator, in 1984, turned the trick. James Cameron's hurtling, resonant parable, about a cyborg come from the future to kill a woman who would one day give birth to a postapocalypse messiah, gave Schwarzenegger a million rounds of ammunition and 75 words of dialogue, most notably the ultimate death threat: "I'll be back." Playing a robot villain, he also played with moviegoers' expectations; they could root for him to die and cheer when he kept coming back. As Arnold recalls, "A studio executive called me after The Terminator and said, 'I can't believe it. I only saw you a few seconds without your clothes on, and they all went for it.' Then all of the sudden I got all of these action scripts that were unrelated to the body. Each step of the way, there were these changes. And the fans go along with it, as long as you give them quality."
Scratch a critic and you'll get an admission that Schwarzenegger's films have the quality of ferocity. There is something in Arnold that sparks the pinwheeling imaginations of action directors. They get him to lift trucks, carry huge trees on his shoulder, upend telephone booths with little punks inside. In Mark L. Lester's puckishly violent Commando, he righteously kills dozens of people in his determination to save a single life; as one helpful woman observes of Arnold and his adversaries, "These guys eat too much red meat." John McTiernan's Predator (1987) twists another commando genre into a jungle monster movie: half a dozen supersoldiers infiltrate enemy territory -- and Arnold gets to go mano a mano with a space alien who looks like the Creature from the Black Hole. And in this year's Total Recall, directed by Paul Verhoeven, he prowls through a densely detailed futureworld while masquerading as a villain, a fat woman and (least convincingly) an ordinary guy.