Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t need a pump-up playlist. “My vision pumps me up,” he says, with all the confidence of a man who once bench-pressed the American Dream. “I’m in a way kind of like a machine. I don’t even start thinking until I’ve finished my workout.” That discipline—part Terminator, part monk—forms the spine of FUBAR, his first-ever TV series, and Arnold, a Netflix documentary that tracks the three lives he’s somehow managed to cram into one.
“I always had a clear vision,” Schwarzenegger tells me. “First, be a bodybuilding champion. Then, come to America and be a movie star. And be rich and famous.” Check, check, and check. He now adds “Netflix leading man” to the résumé with FUBAR, an action-comedy that picks up where True Lies left off, if True Lies had featured his daughter as a fellow CIA operative, played by Monica Barbaro, and a supporting cast of scene-stealing comedians like Fortune Feimster, Travis Van Winkle, and Adam Pally.
“It took a long time to convince people,” he says about turning his spy persona into a series. “I’ve been trying to get them to do a show on Conan or Twins forever! But now that TV is hip and all the big actors are doing it, suddenly it’s a good idea.”
Schwarzenegger relishes the extended format. “In a movie, maybe you’re doing two hours. With this, you get eight hours to play the same character under different circumstances,” he explains. “That gives you more meat, more moments, and more fun.” And if he sounds more ensemble-friendly than his one-man-army image suggests, don’t be fooled. “I just wanted to work with talented people,” he shrugs. “They made me shine.”
The show’s central gag—that both father and daughter are secret agents hiding it from each other—also feels deeply meta. “It’s like, here’s this guy saving the world but can’t figure out what’s going on in his own family,” he says. It’s both a sitcom trope and a winking callback to every 90s Schwarzenegger movie where domesticity came second to detonators.
That era—the Reagan-glossed 80s and early 90s—is dissected in Arnold, a three-part docuseries that breaks his life into phases: the bodybuilder, the action hero, the governor. “Reagan was a big force,” he recalls. “He brought this energy, this strength, and it carried over to the types of movies that were successful. Suddenly the one-man army was back. Law and order. Fighting for the country. That was the moment for guys like me.”
Then Clinton happened. “The press wanted to unwind that,” he says. “They tried to destroy Last Action Hero before it came out. They said action heroes were over. But then True Lies came out and boom—huge hit. So, nice try.”
If there’s anything surprising about Schwarzenegger’s turn to TV, it’s how natural it feels. FUBAR isn’t just another spy series—it’s Schwarzenegger: The Sitcom Years. There’s enough self-parody to keep it fun, enough stuntwork to keep it Schwarzenegger. And when I ask if he has a personal action-movie theme song in his head for scenes like these, he dismisses it with a laugh. “I don’t need music. I just get on my bike and go.”
Of course he does.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailers below.
