Arnold Schwarzenegger talks Season 2 of 'FUBAR', 'Twins' and his iconic catchphrases

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When Arnold Schwarzenegger said he’d be back for another season of FUBAR, he meant it.

No stranger to sequels (he’s appeared in six Terminator movies), the veteran action man had a ball filming the Netflix spy-adventure series, which first debuted back in 2023.

“When they came to me, they pitched the idea of doing a show that is like True Lies. So I was absolutely ecstatic about that,” Schwarzenegger, 77, says in a virtual interview from Los Angeles. 

Released in 1994, True Lies cast Schwarzenegger as a mild-mannered family man who keeps his life as an undercover agent a secret from his wife and daughter. 

FUBAR put a twist on that plotline by casting the “Austrian Oak” as Luke and Top Gun: Maverick actress Monica Barbaro as his daughter Emma in a story about two clandestine operatives who discover they are part of the same secretive agency.

Created by Nick Santora, who is the brains behind Amazon’s Reacher series and has written episodes of The Sopranos and Prison Break, Season 2 of FUBAR finds Luke and Emma and the rest of their undercover team going up against a new mysterious terrorist threatening to unleash worldwide chaos.

“They really accomplished their goal of making it even bigger and better than Season 1,” the father of five says.

Carrie-Anne Moss joins in on the fun as an old flame of Luke’s. No stranger to action herself, The Matrix star says the pair hit it off immediately.

“It just felt so natural working together, and yet I had never met Arnold before,” Moss, 57, says.

Below, the bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-governor was joined by Moss as he discussed FUBAR’s latest season and reminisced about all his iconic catchphrases.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, FUBAR blends a lot of the genres that find their way into many of your past films — comedy, action, drama — what was it about this world that Nick Santora created and producer David Ellison brought to you that appealed to you?

Schwarzenegger: “It was the idea of doing something that had been based on True Lies … Then when I read the scripts for Season 1, I was ecstatic. We shot it in Toronto and that was a great experience. They brought it out on Father’s Day weekend in 2023 and it was a huge success. It was number one for an endless amount of time … So with Season 2, it became, ‘How do we take this to the next level?’ Because when you do a Season 2 or a sequel, you have to ramp it up … But that’s what they were able to accomplish. It’s funnier, there’s more comedy, more romance, dance sequences and action. The fights and brutality that is in there, the killings that go on. It’s just wild.”

Ms. Moss, what was it like working with Arnold and joining Season 2?

Moss: “Every day was a joy to work alongside him; fighting with him and dancing with him and flirting … My character, Greta, is such an outrageous flirt. She’s so confident and she’s so bold. Those are such fun things. Nothing was too big. You could just go wherever you wanted to go, which is a fun thing to do as an actor.”

There’s a dance scene in this that is a nod to the one Arnold and Tia Carrere performed in True Lies. Did that come easy, Mr. Schwarzenegger?

Schwarzenegger: “I’m terrible at it … She’s a lot more natural about the whole thing. I needed more practice and more preparation and all that stuff. I just don’t have the natural talent for dancing.”

Moss: “Not true at all. He commands that energy and sells it so well … That’s challenging.”

Schwarzenegger: “Yeah, after doing a thousand reps.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger, the first film I saw of yours in the theatre was Twins, which was your first comedy as a leading man. At that point in your career, you had been acting in mostly action films. How did you convince the studio to let you try your hand at doing something funny?

Schwarzenegger: “I think what convinced the studios was, number one, Ivan Reitman. He had just finished directing Ghostbusters. He said to me, ‘I want to do a comedy with you.’ So he’s the one (who gave me an opportunity) to do this movie. Number two, was the financial arrangement. We took no money upfront. The studio liked that … But we took a 40% back-end (of the profits). So you can imagine how much money we made. The movie made almost $300 million worldwide, so we really cashed in big time.

“We convinced them to do it because it only cost them $16.5 million to make it. They were at risk and we were at risk. But we did it, and it was highly successful … Then all the naysayers who said, ‘Schwarzenegger can only be sold in an action movie,’ all of a sudden were sending me scripts to do comedies.”

‘That’s it and that’s all’ is one of your popular catchphrases on FUBAR. Throughout your career you’ve had many memorable one-liners. Is there one you’re surprised stuck around?

Schwarzenegger: “All of them were a surprise. When we did Terminator and I said, ‘I’ll be back,’ no one ever thought that would be a line that people would repeat. Or for instance in Predator when I stabbed the guy in the chest with the dagger and afterwards I said, ‘Stick around!’ Things like that, no one would ever think that this would be a line that people would laugh and repeat —  ‘Get to the choppa!’ —  all these lines kind of surprise me — ‘It’s not a tumour. It’s not a tumour at all.’ All this crazy stuff. But I think it’s the way I said it that made it kind of unique. It wasn’t just the way that it was written.”

Season 2 of FUBAR is now streaming on Netflix.

mdaniell@postmedia.com