Bosch
Season 3 Sun Universal (*117) 20:00 Repeat Fri Universal 21:40 Action
Arnold Vosloo’s roles have two common elements: they’re either baddies or they like guns. In season 3 of action show Bosch (2014-current), he’s mixing them as Rafael Tafero, an ex-cop who’s now in “private security”. And despite living in the US for over 25 years, he admits that “I still miss home”.
Home is where he got into acting, with his most famous local role as misfit army cadet Boetie van Tonder in 1984 satire film Boetie Gaan Border Toe.
The 54-year-old doesn’t get to visit SA and his family as much as he’d like, but he got to mix business with pleasure in 2016 – Arnold was in locally filmed drama Cape Town (2016) in the role of baddie Robin van Rees.
He jokes about it now, but Arnold almost quit action fantasy movies The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001). He played resurrected Egyptian priest Imhotep and says that “I’m no Mr Fitness, but I was in shape. Then I went to London and they showed me my [loin-cloth] wardrobe. It’s like a postage stamp!”
Arnold’s got an equally famous doppelgänger. “People come up to me and say, ‘Are you that guy from [1997 drama film] Titanic?’ and I tell them ‘Yes, I am Billy Zane.’”
While he calls SA “home”, Arnold has been a US citizen since 1988, the year he married US actress Nancy Mulford. They met while filming action film Skeleton Coast in 1987 but divorced in 1991. Arnold married businesswoman and current wife Sylvia Ahi in 1998.
Like Imhotep, the actor has risen from the dead, sort of. There was a death-hoax email in 2015 saying that Arnie died in a car crash, “But as you can see, I’m alive and well,” he says.