Why I’d still make a great president
The Terminator star tells John Hiscock about healing his private life, returning to acting – and maybe to politics too
Arnold Schwarzenegger turned his back on politics in 2010 to rebuild the acting career he had abandoned to serve for seven years as governor of California.
He has never given any hint of wanting to return to the political arena until now, when he says he would like to counter the “crazy stuff ” coming from the jumble of candidates vying for the Republican nomination. He names no names, but Schwarzenegger could well be referring to prospective candidate Donald Trump’s recent speech in which he referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists”. The Terminator star is, of course, an immigrant himself.
“If I had been born here it would give me great pleasure to jump into that race,” he tells me. “I think I could make the same impact I did during my race as governor, getting through the crowd very quickly and emerging with sound statements and sound visions instead of the crazy stuff that you hear out there now.”
The 67-year-old former bodybuilder, who is a vocal supporter of gay marriage and describes himself as being in the centre rather than on the Right of the Republican Party, reveals: “I have to say that I fell in love with policy and politics and sometimes even today I miss it, especially when I see all of this field of candidates jumping into the race.
“The Republican Party always has a large tent and I don’t have to always agree with them, but there are some issues that are very important to me, so I will always be a loyal Republican.”
Four years after the sex scandal that ended his marriage and threatened his career and his credibility, Arnold Schwarzenegger has bounced back.
“I am absolutely delighted with my life,” he beams when we talk in a Los Angeles hotel suite. “We all fall at one time or another and this was a major fall. I had to get up again because only losers stay down and winners get up.
“I had to get up again and move forward and say, ‘Okay, now how do I heal and how can I bring everyone together again?’”
The Austrian-born star is now more ebullient than ever. He is dating Heather Milligan, a physical therapist almost 30 years his junior, and has mended the fences with his ex-wife Maria Shriver and his family. He appears in the new Terminator film, and has several other films in the offing.
It has been a turbulent few years for the actor-turned politician who admitted to a long-running affair with the family housekeeper Mildred Baena and the secret birth of their child, Joseph, now aged 17.
“It was me who screwed up,” he says. “I’m to blame.”
It was, he said, his “biggest personal failure” and led to his divorce from his wife of 25 years. “But this is not the first time I have been confronted by failure and I’ve always been able to get up again when I fall.”
He has four children with Shriver: Patrick, 23, Christopher, 17, Katherine, 25, and Christina, 23. “It is fantastic,” the star added of his family, “including my fifth child with Mildred. He’s terrific and he totally understands the situation. So, it all has worked out.
“I’m very happy that I have a great relationship with my family. But I can’t take credit for it all myself , because obviously Maria did a great job also. We both behaved like grown-ups and said the best for the kids would be if we really show a good example, that maybe I screwed up on some things, but let’s go and raise the kids together and really show harmony.”
Throughout his acting career and later, in his campaign for governor, Schwarzenegger was dogged by reports that he groped female assistants and sexually harassed women. His affair with the housekeeper was, for Shriver, the final straw. Despite what he calls his “huge amount of failures” it has been a remarkable life for Schwarzenegger, who won the Mr Europe title when he was 19. The following year he moved to America and after winning the Mr Universe and Mr Olympia crowns, took up acting and went on to become the world’s highest-paid action star in films such as Total Recall, True Lies and the Terminator series.
He went into politics in 2003, leaving the film industry on a high note, having received £20 million for starring in Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines. After leaving the California governor’s office he made a successful return, winking at his older tough-guy status in the Expendables movies, playing an embattled sheriff in The Last Stand and going the low-budget route as a grizzled dad in the forthcoming zombie movie Maggie.
But, he admits, he had his doubts as to whether he would be accepted after his long break. “The fear in me was that there would be a new breed of action heroes coming up while I was away. Well, that didn’t happen,” he says with some satisfaction. “So when I did my cameo on The Expendables, which only took me four hours to film and the audience applauded when I came on the screen, I knew I’d be accepted and I could go back into the movie business.” For the fifth instalment of the sci-fi Terminator series, Terminator Genisys, he returns as a senior T-800 cyborg nicknamed Pops. This time, the Sarah Connor of 1984 (portrayed then by Linda Hamilton and now by Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones) is a target of forces from a grim future in which humans fight the artificial intelligence system Skynet. Schwarzenegger’s T800 cyborg is Connor’s protector.
“For the last 25 years I have been a father, so playing the protector of Sarah Connor came very naturally to me,” says Schwarzenegger, who worked out for two hours a day, six days a week, to get in shape for the role. There is talk of another movie in the offing as well Terminator True Lies as a sequel to and a return to Conan the Barbarian in a sequel, The Legend of Conan. “My life has been so blessed and has been so wonderful, I don’t know if I would change anything,” he insists. “I’d leave it alone, even with the mistakes I made.”
Terminator Genisys is on release now