And in his rural Austrian village, hard daily labour was a given. “We had to earn our breakfast by doing sit-ups,” he recounts in his candid 2012 autobiography Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story. Iron-clad discipline was drilled into Arnie by his father, a violent, alcoholic, former Nazi. Because what drives this orange-tanned, Nietzschean Übermensch is something deeper. Possibly he just makes this stuff for fun, or to ensure his swansong movie isn’t a flop like his last Terminator film, Dark Fate, proved, or to keep his ex-wife in alimony. His next movie, Breakout, a jailbreak action thriller from the director of The Expendables 4, promises to leave the Arnie mould similarly unbroken. Which is just as well given his typically wooden performance in Fubar. “Well, here it is.”īut pushing the acting envelope has never been “the Austrian oak’s” prime objective. “People always ask me when I’m going to do another big action comedy like True Lies,” he’s stated, referring to James Cameron’s 1994 film. Artistically speaking, Fubar is a retread, as Arnie himself unashamedly attests. A fun yet expendable action-comedy, it co-stars Schwarzenegger and Monica Barbaro as a father-daughter duo who, unbeknown to each other, are both secretly living a lie as CIA agents.

It’s got to be something bigger than Fubar. But back to achieve what, exactly? What’s he got left to prove? “I’m back, baby,” Arnie then growls, smugly, in case we were in any doubt. Now, aged 75, the man who might well have been US president, were he not disqualified by his Austrian origins, is back, yet again, with Fubar, his first scripted TV series. It’s actually a Winston Churchill quote that says ‘I see only my objective and all obstacles must give way.’ ” He moves forward with unbridled discipline and focus. Bishop has cited Schwarzenegger as one of history’s greatest strategists. “The beauty of ‘I’ll be back’ is that Arnie lives it,” explains marketing expert Ashton Bishop, who, with his company Step Change, has run million-dollar campaigns for brands such as Sony Pictures. He’s reinvented himself from the world’s greatest bodybuilder to the world’s highest-paid movie star, to the leader of (what was then) the world’s sixth largest economy. There’s no escaping the relentless, five-decades-and-counting global cultural onslaught of Arnie-ness. It’s a threat that Schwarzenegger has undoubtedly made good on. He’s chucked it into numerous movies and innumerable political speeches, flogged it on caps and T-shirts, preserved it in cement on Hollywood Boulevard and even recently, and rather glibly, scrawled the phrase in the Auschwitz Museum guestbook. and he’s barely stopped uttering it since. It was back in 1984 when Arnold Schwarzenegger first uttered that immortal phrase “I’ll be back” in The Terminator.

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