Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to change how we talk about climate change
On his mission to ‘terminate pollution’, Arnold Schwarzenegger tells us what environmentalists and governments have got wrong by ‘signing agreements that don’t mean anything’.
We are sitting beside a roaring fireplace in an outdoor sitting room next to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s swimming pool, discussing masculinity, when the pig starts to get noisy.
“Schnelly,” he calls. “Would you like a cookie?” Schnelly snuffes and snorts. “Come,” he says. “Let’s feed Schnelly.”
The enormous pet pig follows us inside to the kitchen. Schnelly knows exactly where the cookie jar lives. Schwarzenegger passes me an oat cookie and the pig gently eats it from my hand. A tiny geriatric Yorkshire terrier called Cherry joins us, fresh from her weekly bath. A mobile grooming team are in a van parked on the front driveway primping his two other dogs, one a leonberger called Schnitzel, the other an Alaskan malamute called Dutch weighing 70kg.
He points outside to the sofa where I was sitting. “Schnelly likes to cuddle up on there in the evenings.” It seems doubtful the pig could get up on the sofa – his belly practically drags on the ground. “Yes, yes, look,” he says tenderly, leading us back to the sofa to point out Schnelly’s little custom-made step.
The pig waddles back to his pen beside the pool in which Schwarzenegger kept his Rodin sculptures safe underwater during LA’s wildfires earlier this year. The blaze came perilously close; a blackened line scars the hills beyond his lawn. He settles back into his alfresco leather armchair and lights a fat cigar.
This isn’t how I’d pictured the interview. It was supposed to take place over breakfast at a hotel in Santa Monica where he eats every morning after working out at Gold’s Gym near Venice Beach. I’d found him at a restaurant table with his chief of staff (who used to work in the White House), a German bodybuilder turned movie star and an old Austrian friend with whom Schwarzenegger trained that morning. I was wondering how on Earth this was going to work, when he gestures to my Dictaphone. “It’s a very noisy place,” he says. “Stone floor, hard ceiling, hard walls, glass. So there is nowhere to absorb the sound. I don’t know why we set this up here.” I’d been worrying about that, I agree. “Don’t do thinking and worrying. Let’s eat, then we’ll go to my house.”
Heads turn as we pass through the hotel lobby, and a young man and his mother ask for a selfie. “Of course. Is this your sister?” Schwarzenegger asks. The woman swoons with delight. I ask afterwards, does he always say that? “Always!” He chuckles. “And it always works!”
So now we’re at his mansion in the hills of Brentwood. It has an impressive home gym but he prefers to work out at Gold’s, a rough-and-ready place the size of an aircraft hangar that anyone can join. I’d passed it on my way to breakfast and had spotted him from the pavement, among the grizzled musclemen working out on the weight machines in the gym car park.
Most celebrities consider their fame the unwelcome price of success, I observe to him, but I detect no hostility in him towards his. He narrows his eyes thoughtfully and nods. “You’re absolutely right. What people miss the most is to get attention. That someone knows them, is aware of them, that they’re somebody. And so they go to a shrink. They lie on the couch and someone is listening to them. But I go out anywhere to a crowd and they all listen. And they love to listen to my shit, right? I’m having fifty thousand shrinks sitting out there, and I don’t pay a f..king penny. I get paid! So how can I complain about that?” A growl of happy laughter erupts from him.
“OK, yes, there are times when you go to a restaurant and someone comes up and says, ‘Can I take a picture of you?’ But I can walk into this restaurant at any time, I can sit at any table I want, I make no reservation. For that I take a picture with someone. It takes three minutes. So why would I complain?”
Schwarzenegger may well be the happiest person I’ve ever interviewed – or possibly ever met. He finds literally nothing to complain about during our four hours together. Even Donald Trump, whose presidency he abhors, cannot rile him. “This country’s going through a difficult moment but it’s not the end of the world,” he says. If you close your eyes he sounds a lot like a shrink himself, sonorous and calm, and his physical bearing is equally measured. He is a great believer in setting goals and it’s easy to see why, because almost everything in his life has gone precisely to plan.
He was born in an Austrian village in 1947, the son of a former Nazi stormtrooper who returned from the war with PTSD and a drink problem. Schwarzenegger grew up in a spartan house with no plumbing but regular beatings, and at ten set his heart on America. He started lifting weights at 15, and when he came across an issue of Muscle Builder magazine featuring Reg Park, a former soccer player from Yorkshire who had won Mr Universe and gone on to star in Hollywood movies, Schwarzenegger decided he would too.
He trained fanatically, became the youngest person to win the title of Mr Universe at 20 and moved to Los Angeles a year later. While winning many more bodybuilding titles he studied English and business, and had made his first million in property deals before retiring from professional bodybuilding in 1975. But when he told Hollywood agents he wanted to become a film star, “everyone said, ‘I don’t understand what the f..k you’re saying, you sound scary, you sound like a f..king Nazi, and no one is going to buy you in America’.”
Intensive accent training and relentless acting classes led to a series of modest parts, one of which won him a Golden Globe for best newcomer, before his 1982 breakout role in Conan the Barbarian. A year later he fulfilled his childhood dream of becoming an American citizen. The following year he starred in The Terminator, became a global movie star and in 1986 married into the Kennedy dynasty with a star-studded wedding to Maria Shriver, JFK’s niece.
His very first words to Shriver’s mother, a formidable Massachusetts matriarch, had been unpromising – “Your daughter has a nice ass” – so I ask how he explains his capacity to change, more than possibly anyone in public life. “It was all a learning process, which was fine for me, because I always felt like my brain is a kind of sponge that wants to absorb a lot of information. And the same happened with politics.”
A darling of the Republican Party, despite his marriage to a Democrat, he served as President George HW Bush’s fitness czar in the 1990s, and in 2003 stood for governor of California. “I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to do with California. It just flashed in my mind. I saw thousands of people and I saw me telling them, ‘I will save you. I will save the state, don’t worry.’ This vision was just always there. But there was a lot of stuff I still needed to learn, so I was sitting right here every night till one in the morning.”
Campaign advisers swam in the pool while they took turns to coach him. “A woman from financing was telling me about the budget, then she would get tired after an hour and then the next guy was drying himself and sitting down in his bathing suit and talking to me about energy. Then he got back in the pool and someone else talked about campaigning. So you learn.”
After he won, his wife told him, “I don’t think I’ve ever watched anyone who is as competitive as you are. But the question now is, would you be at all interested in policy – or is it just politics?” He allows a rueful grin and widens his eyes. “I didn’t really know until I got in there. And then I found out that I was so curious. I wanted to know how everything really worked. And then my wife says a year later, ‘Oh man, was I wrong. You’re becoming a policy wonk.’”
Schwarzenegger governed California until the end of his two-term limit in 2011; he passed groundbreaking environmental legislation including the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, and reduced the state’s emissions by 25 per cent. Had the US Constitution not disbarred candidates born outside America, he would have gone on to run for president.
The one chapter in his life he did not plan came just weeks after he left office, when his wife of 25 years left him. The couple had four children – then 21, 19, 17 and 13 – and the marriage had been strained by his years working away in the state capital, Sacramento. But it was Shriver’s suspicion that he was the father of their Guatemalan housekeeper’s 13-year-old son, Joseph, that led them to couples therapy.
Shriver had stood by her husband when allegations surfaced in 2003 of sexual misconduct against 15 women. “I have done things that were not right, which I thought then were playful,” he said at the time. “But now I recognise that I offended people. I want to say to them I am deeply sorry about that and I apologise.” She didn’t know then that he’d also had an affair with their housekeeper.
When Joseph was born, Schwarzenegger had no idea he was the father. By the time the boy was eight the resemblance had become unmistakeable, and he assumed financial responsibility for him and his mother – but kept the secret until challenged directly in a therapy session. He confessed and Shriver filed for divorce.
The biographical parallels with Donald Trump are uncanny. They are just a year apart in age (Trump just turned 79; Schwarzenegger will be 78 next month). Both are multi-millionaire property investors who launched Republican political careers from screen stardom. Both have complicated family lives and a string of allegations of sexual misconduct. Just like Trump, he is big on social media and a world expert in condensing politics into catchphrases, with a huge following of young men.
In temperament, however, they could not be more different. “The overall theme of everything I do today,” Schwarzenegger says, “is to make the world a better place. To entertain people, to get them fit, to make them feel good about themselves.”
I ask if he shares the growing concern that masculinity is in crisis, with young men drawn to online misogyny. He claims to have never even heard of Andrew Tate, but reflects: “The majority of people have a problem. They feel down, depressed, not in a good mood. People come up to me in the gym and ask, ‘How can I get up in the morning and feel good?’ Well, I’m not an expert in psychology and all this stuff. But I tell them, what works for me is not to think. So therefore, don’t think. Just work out and struggle and fight. This will make you feel good mentally.”
What else do young men need? “I don’t know if I have the solution or not. But when I think about my kids, none of them have that problem. And the reason is because there was a strong father there. I gave them discipline and didn’t let them get away with anything. And they were taught how to make their beds, they were taught how to wash their clothes. Because it’s like the way I grew up.”
Then he gets out his iPad to show me videos of him painting Mother’s Day cards with his two young granddaughters and his expression melts as he points out their rapt gaze. “So I think that kids need a father and a mother. It’s always the key. And if they don’t have a father, some other male has to come in.”
His chief of staff, who helps manage his social media, mentions how many of his young male followers lack a father figure. It’s the role Schwarzenegger enjoys most. His only brother died in a car crash in Austria at the age of 24, leaving a young son, Patrick. Schwarzenegger brought his nephew to the US at 19, put him through college and got him a job at Gold’s Gym; Patrick is now a successful entertainment lawyer in LA. “Of course he missed his father, but that we couldn’t do anything about. He was dead. So now it was just surrounding him with the support and with male reinforcement, to say this is what you should do. The male dominance, that’s what they idolise.”
He has a close relationship with Joseph, now 27, who is also a bodybuilder, actor and property investor. “He’s a religious fanatic about training,” Schwarzenegger says, beaming proudly. “He has a really good physique and he’s doing really well with his real estate and with his acting.”
Schwarzenegger’s oldest son, also called Patrick, 31, is an actor too, and recently starred in The White Lotus. “Patrick never asked me a question about acting. But he came many times to me and said, ‘I just did an interview with this magazine and two thirds of the questions were about you.’ But I was just in New York and a journalist comes up and says, ‘What’s it like being the father of Patrick Schwarzenegger?’” Delight floods his features. “All of a sudden, everything has changed around. I walk into the gym and it used to be the girls would come up and give me their contact. And then after White Lotus comes out, the girl comes up and says, ‘Here’s my contact, give it to Patrick.’ So it’s wonderful. If I go to my grave and know that my son has outdone me, I’m in heaven.”
His eldest daughter, Katherine, 35, is a successful author married to the film star Chris Pratt. My 14-year-old son wanted me to ask who would win in a fight between Pratt and Schwarzenegger. He considers this seriously. “Good question. I don’t know.” His other daughter, Christina, 33, is a producer but keeps a lower profile.
Very little is known about his youngest, Christopher, 27, except that he recently lost a lot of weight. Being heavily overweight since early childhood in this athletic, famous family must have been hard. I wonder if it was also difficult for his father. “You’re telling me. I could never go and say to him, ‘You’re overweight.’ We just kept introducing healthy foods. We introduced him always to the gym and all of that kind of stuff. And then, out of nowhere, he decided that he wanted to be lean. And now he is. So that is of course fantastic, the self-discipline and the self-motivation. I always felt one day it will have to come from him – and it did.”
Schwarzenegger’s partner since 2013 is a physiotherapist and former gymnast, Heather Milligan, 50. The couple follow a largely vegan diet, so I ask if – other than cigars – he has any vices. “You should probably ask my girlfriend. Oh, or my wife,” he says, chuckling indulgently. “She would definitely find a few.”
He and his ex-wife have in fact maintained a strikingly good relationship, of which he is tremendously proud. In April she published her memoir, I Am Maria, in which she writes of the end of the marriage, “It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me”, but also details her journey to forgiveness. I ask if he has read it. “I will. She brought it over the other day, as a matter of fact. My daughters tell me it’s really good.”
He very rarely gets angry, he says, but cries easily. The national anthem often moves him to tears, and sentimental movies make him weep buckets. At this point in life, I ask, does anything make him nervous? “Whenever I have to perform. The heart rate goes up and I feel my heart pounding, before I do a speech, before the camera, when the director says, ‘Rolling.’ Every time.” The surprise on my face seems to please him. “I pretend that I have my act together but I don’t always feel like I do,” he says. “I just cover it up pretty well.”
His three entirely different careers continue to this day, with a daily fitness newsletter, Arnold’s Pump Club, a weight-training app, The Pump, and his annual Arnold Sports Festival and Arnold Classic bodybuilding contest. He is still acting, with the second season of Fubar, his Netflix spy action drama, released this month and The Man with the Bag, an action-comedy film, coming out at Christmas.
But the thing he is best at, he says, is selling. “I always had, what we say in Austria, the schmäh.” His eyes twinkle. “The bullshit.” In other words, salesmanship.
His political career is now focused on selling environmentalism, the cause he achieved most for when governor. Since 2017 he has held an annual climate conference in Vienna, gathering together experts from 80 countries. “But our conference is concentrating on communication rather than” – he pulls a withering face – “signing agreements that don’t mean anything.”
I attended this year’s conference. The day began with a surprise announcement on Vienna’s public transport system, broadcast to commuters every 30 minutes: “Here is your chief mobility officer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, talking to you. Thank you for your commitment to a healthy planet. You’re all real climate action heroes.”
Austria’s president, Alexander Van der Bellen, hosted the conference in his imperial 13th-century palace, where speakers ranged from Tony Blair to the former Formula 1 champion Nico Rosberg, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and a member of the cast from the US version of The Office. Blair opened the conference, announcing: “Only twice have my kids ever said, ‘That’s cool.’ Once when I appeared on The Simpsons and last month when Arnold posted a photo of me and him with Danny DeVito.”
The host of a TV show called American Ninja Warrior, a giant of a man, emceed in the style of a WWE presenter. The secretary-general of the United Nations addressed the ballroom via video from New York, Austria’s newly elected chancellor made a speech and The BossHoss, a heavily tattooed German country rock band dressed in cowboy boots and stetsons, performed a new track that features Schwarzenegger delivering his immortal line, “I’ll be back.”
The ballroom became a forest of upheld iPhones as Schwarzenegger took to the stage. “Stop whining and get to work,” he urged his audience. “We’ve got to terminate pollution.” He told them how he passed legislation in California. “Did we whine like girlie men? No! And now we must terminate pollution.”
All royal protocol went out the window when he suggested, “Join us for lunch with the president.” Startled palace aides scuttled off to rearrange place name settings and I followed Schwarzenegger, his girlfriend and his retinue along acres of red carpet, through baroque grandeur and lavish gilt to a grand dining room. It was not a normal climate change conference.
In LA he tells me how he hates talking about climate change – “it’s a bullshit f..king name” – so he came up with the phrase “terminate pollution” instead because “everyone knows what that means”. He recounts how, two years ago in Washington, he asked a group of 20 Republicans: “’How many of you are interested in fighting pollution?’ They all raised their hands. So I said, “Well, what about climate change?’ And it became right away, ‘We don’t know if this is true. This is maybe a hoax.’ So why have that debate?”
How does he feel about the phrase net zero? “Well, this is a bullshit thing too! Go to a town like Leeds or Manchester and ask people, what’s net zero? They don’t know what the f..k that means.” I remind him that Blair caused a big fuss in the UK recently by criticising net zero targets.
“But it’s all bogus!” he exclaims. “Because that’s not the argument. The argument is, how do we go and terminate pollution? It’s not fighting about net zero or, oh, how many percentage points have you rolled it back from the 1990 level. What’s 1990 to do with anything? It’s just a stupid dialogue. Let’s just start rolling back the pollution output by 25 per cent. And that’s exactly what we did in California.”
Isn’t the problem that his country is now run by a man who promised to drill, baby, drill? “Washington maybe is not in the mood right now to do that, but that doesn’t mean I have to wait for them. Because the biggest movements in history were created by people, not by government. So let’s not concentrate on what Trump says. Let’s concentrate on what we can do to inspire people.”
Boris Johnson, he points out, introduced Boris Bikes to London. “And now every city in the world has these bikes! And when Saturday Night Fever came out, there was no government contract that said you have to build discotheques. But the entire world was suddenly building discotheques! It just shows the power of communication and the power of movies.”
Of all the movie characters he has played, he says the one he’d choose to be in real life is Julius from Twins, and I can see why. Julius was sweetly innocent, naive to the point of childlike, yet highly intelligent. Schwarzenegger’s own philosophy is a not dissimilar blend of deceptively cartoonish simplicity and prodigious sophistication.
He takes another puff on his cigar. “Look, here’s the bottom line. Whenever a car company comes out with a new model, they have an ad agency that looks at that car very carefully. They pay the company millions of dollars to work out how to sell that car. Do you think the environmentalists ever hired that company and said, ‘Can you help us to craft a way of communicating with the masses?’” A sigh of cigar smoke punctuates his disappointment.
“Environmentalists,” he adds kindly, “their heart is in the right place and I’m very fond of their work. But their communication skills really suck.”
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