When Arnold Schwarzenegger first burst onto the acting scene – or tried to, at least – in the 1970s, leading men tended to be fairly ordinary-looking and average-sized everymen, which of course made the ridiculously jacked and thick-accented Austrian stick out like a sore thumb.
Fairly or not, when he was deemed an irrelevant relic of a bygone age decades later, the idea of the action hero had morphed once again from the burly Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone types into the more grounded and rugged likes of Bruce Willis and Keanu Reeves, but you can’t say the Austrian Oak didn’t find incredible success during that in-between period.
Reflecting on trying to break through during his appearance on Rob Lowe’s Literally! podcast, the former Governor of California looked back on repeatedly being told he wasn’t going to make it, even if it doesn’t need to be pointed out who ended up having the last laugh following a staggeringly successful career.
“In the ’70s, when I said I wanted to get into movies, all the producers and directors and studio executives and agents were saying to me, ‘It’s never gonna happen.’ And one of the reasons was that my body was too big. They said to me, ‘Look at the stars today… Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, De Niro, Woody Allen. Those are the sex symbols. People don’t want to see big muscles. You’re 100 pounds too heavy. Forget it.”
In fairness, it wasn’t until the 1980s that he cracked the A-list, but if you know anything about Schwarzenegger’s rise to the top of the industry, it was that he saw “no” as more of a challenge than on obstacle.