As one of the biggest celebrities on the planet, both in terms of pop culture cache and in terms of sheer body mass, Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t the kind of dude that many people would readily make fun of to his face. And even fewer would produce an entire Super Bowl commercial taking aim at the strongman’s unmistakable Austrian accent, at least not without consent from the man himself. Thankfully, the Terminator vet was all good appearing with Jake from State Farm for the company’s latest Super Bowl commercial, which puts its spotlight on Ah-nold’s seeming inability to end the phrase “like a good neighbor” with a hard R sound.
For all that the ad made our list of the funniest Super Bowl LVIII commercials for being a pure hoot — especially the extended version shared below — it’s unfortunate that the jokey premise was an all-too-real hurdle that could have potentially derailed his career had Schwarzenegger not been as confident as he was talented during his attempts to pushing forward into acting. Speaking with Yahoo! Entertainment, he reflected on being told early on that his muscles would hinder his star status and that his accent would keep him from landing leading actor roles. In his words:
[The commercial] is funny, but it is also funny for me personally. In the ’70s when I got into movies, people said, ‘You will never be a leading man because you have an accent.’
You can just imagine the person that shared that highly incorrect statement to be someone who would have told Leonardo di Vinci he’d never be familiar to anyone outside his country, or would have told Taylor Swift she’d peak as an indie act. Even if the person was right about everything else in life, underestimating Schwarzenegger is enough of a gaffe to cause permanent damage.
The actor continued, pointing out that he voiced some of cinema’s most celebrated movie lines, and attributes the popularity in part to the very element that he was told to change. As he put it:
Here we are decades later. So many of my movie lines became so popular because of the way I pronounce things. This commercial plays off that, and I laughed my head off when I read it.
From “I’ll be bahk,” to “Get to dah choppah!” to “Get you ass to Mahs,” Schwarzenegger has granted cinema with tons of top-notch quotes, many of which aren’t necessarily all that engaging without an interesting performance attached. I don’t know that Daniel Day Lewis would have put quite the same English on Kindergarten Cop‘s “It’s not a too-mah.”
To be fair, the FUBAR lead did try losing the accent at one point when he still believed that it might have a negative impact. But he presumably figured out soon enough that trying to sound like American actors was as near-impossible as it’d be to try and look like them. Schwarzenegger himself has talked about how today’s Hollywood features many more muscle-covered talents than the selection available when he was getting started in the biz.
Check out the explosive extended cut of the State Farm commercial below.
While waiting to see where Arnold Schwarzenegger might pop up next on the big screen, head to our 2024 movie schedule to plot out what you’ll be watching in the meantime.