Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Credit: X/@Schwarzenegger
Los Angeles: Arnold Schwarzenegger says he had multiple coaches to prepare for his Hollywood debut and that included a guy who was supposed to help the Austria-born star get rid of his accent.
Schwarzenegger, however, ended up landing a role in Terminator because of his accent as filmmaker James Cameron thought he sounded like a machine, reported entertainment portal IndieWire.
During an appearance on “The Graham Norton Show”, Schwarzenegger spoke about the beginnings of his American acting career.
"I had an English coach, and an acting coach, and a speech coach, and an accent-removal coach — who has passed away since then, but I mean, I should have otherwise gotten my money back," Schwarzenegger told Norton.
The former California governor said he would spend hours with the coach to sound like an American, working on pronunciation of words like 'three' or 'wine', which sound different in German, the official language of Austria.
"I remember he'd say, ‘You know you always say ‘sree.’ It’s ‘three,’ with a ‘T-H.’ So he had me say, ‘Three thousand three hundred and thirty-three and one-third,’ with the ‘T-H’ and not with the ‘S,” he said. “We would say, ‘This is a nice vine.’ But it’s actually ‘wine,’ right? So the guy had me say ‘A fine wine grows on vine.’ I was saying things like that over and over again. It was very helpful, but it didn’t get rid of my accent.”
He may not have succeeded in souding American but Schwarzenegger managed to break out as an action star with 1982's “Conan the Barbarian” and 1984’s “The Terminator', where his accent became an asset in playing the cyborg killer antagonist.
“When I did Terminator, Jim Cameron said, ‘What made ‘Terminator’ work and why it became successful is because Schwarzenegger talks like a machine,'” Schwarzenegger recalled.
The actor most recently featured in the Netflix series FUBAR and documentary series Arnold.