Arnold Schwarzenegger Claims His Accent Became An “Asset” On Films Like ‘The Terminator,’ Says Director James Cameron Thought He “Talks Like A Machine”

Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘s trademark accent and inflection was almost terminated. In a recent interview on The Graham Norton Show, the Austrian actor, whose first language was German, revealed that he “had an English coach and an acting coach, a speech coach, and an accent-removal coach.”

While he acknowledged that the accent-removal coach “has passed away since then,” he claimed that he “should have otherwise gotten [his] money back.”

“The bottom line is I worked on it,” he admitted, recalling that he struggled with pronouncing the word “three” due to switching out the “th” sound for an “s” sound.

“So he had me say ‘3,333 1/3,’ with the ‘th’ and not with the ‘s,'” he shared.

After he was commended for his pronunciation progress, the former governor of California quipped, “But I mean, after 5,000 years, right?”

“After doing 5,000 reps on it,” he added.

He also explained that he “get[s] confused with the ‘F’s,’ and the ‘V,’ and the ‘W,’ which prompted another exercise.

“The guy had me say, ‘A fine wine grows on a vine,'” he said.

He also discussed the “vibrating Z” sound, that he noted doesn’t exist in German, and that he would practice saying “the sink is made out of zinc.”

“You know, it was very helpful, but it didn’t get rid of my accent,” he noted. However, this didn’t turn out to be such a bad thing.

“The funny thing is all of the stuff that they said — the Hollywood producers and the directors and all these geniuses — [that] they were saying that this is an obstacle for me to become a leading man, became an asset,” he clarified. “Because when I did Conan the Barbarian, John Milius, the director, said to the press, ‘If we wouldn’t have had Schwarzenegger, we would have had to build one,’ because I was the only one who had the muscles to play the character the way that Frank Frazetta painted it [and] the way Robert E. Howard has written about it.”

This proved to be a similar scenario for The Terminator film franchise, which was launched two years following Milius’ film.

“Then when I did Terminator, [director] Jim (James) Cameron said, ‘What made Terminator work and why it became successful was because Schwarzenegger talks like a machine,” he continued.

The Terminator is streaming on Max and Conan the Barbarian is available to rent or buy on Prime Video. Watch a clip of his interview above.