Arnold Schwarzenegger on the moment he knew he had to come to America

Perhaps no one else in pop culture has better embodied the American Dream than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Coming from a small town in Austria and growing up under the rule of a volatile father, Arnold Schwarzenegger knew he had to leave and become something better – and we can thank film for bringing him to America.

But it’s not traditional film we’re talking about here (although Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first memories of seeing a movie were of then-quintessential American actor John Wayne), but rather reels of stock footage and the like that he was made to watch while in school. As he recalled in The Wall Street Journal, “At age 10, I fell in love with America. That came from watching film rolls in school. The teacher would advance the strips by turning a knob, showing one image at a time. I was blown away. They were about things like the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge and cars with huge fins driving on U.S. highways with six lanes on each side. All of it was over the top. At some point, there was a roll on Hollywood. I’d never seen anything like it—the glamour, the lights and the houses. I said to myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ I wanted to be in America and to become famous and rich.”

As we all know, Arnold Schwarzenegger would make his way to America through the bodybuilding circuit, soon enough being credited as Hercules in Hercules in New York – albeit as Arnold Strong “Mr. Universe.” While Arnold was a bit disappointed in Los Angeles at first, he stuck with America by taking classes in English and business, becoming a citizen in 1983, one year after starring in Conan the Barbarian. One year later, it’s The Terminator. Then Commando and Predator and The Running Man and Total Recall and True Lies and on and on. Oh, and he became the first – and so far only – Austrian native to ever serve as governor in the United States. If only some other positions would allow him to run…

And Arnold keeps going, as he can currently be seen in Netflix’s FUBAR, in which he plays a CIA operative who learns that his daughter (Monica Barbaro) has also secretly been working in the same profession. The second season aired in June.

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