“I didn’t have the time”: The day Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down ‘Full Metal Jacket’
The musclebound European Arnold Schwarzenegger has been responsible for some of the finest examples of action cinema ever made, from the sublime The Terminator to the absurd The Expendables 2, making choosing a favourite of his really difficult.
Then there are all his comedies, which are utterly hilarious, though not always for the right reason, all of which have rendered him one of the all-time Hollywood greats and a legend in his own time.
The thing about Arnie is, for every great role he’s accepted, there are three or four others that he turned down. In an interview with Empire, looking back across his illustrious career, the former ‘Governator’ revealed a number of major films he could have been involved with.
One of them was an unmade Spider-Man movie from James Cameron, in which he would have played Doctor Octopus, about which he said, “It never got there because he had a battle with the studio. They went in a different direction”.
Perhaps the most interesting aborted project was Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, where Schwarzenegger said that he had been in the running to play the character known as ‘Animal Mother’, who ended up being portrayed by Adam Baldwin. When asked to explain why this never happened, he simply responded, “I didn’t have the time”.
Full Metal Jacket was filmed over a gruelling year-long period between 1985 and 1986 and came out in 1987, coinciding with two of Schwarzenegger’s releases, one of which was absolutely worth saying no to Kubrick for. Predator is one of the jewels in Arnie’s crown, a bona fide action classic that spawned a ridiculously successful (and often rubbish) franchise, with the production hit by numerous delays and tragedies before finally concluding in the summer of 1986.
The other film starring Schwarzenegger that came out in ‘87 was one that actually got remade not that long ago. Arnie played Ben Richards in Paul Michael Glaser’s adaptation of The Running Man, and, similar to Predator, had a troubled production. Filming was originally meant to start in 1985 with Christopher Reeve in the lead role, but budget disputes with original director George P Cosmatos led to delays, leading to his exit from the project and being replaced by Andrew Davis, which is when Arnie came on board. Davis lasted just two weeks, which is when the Starsky & Hutch star, Paul Michael Glaser, stepped into the fray.
On paper, Schwarzenegger would have been a perfect fit for ‘Animal Mother’, an ultra-macho hothead who we first meet draped in bullets and carrying the biggest gun you’ve ever seen in your life. Arnie certainly fits the bill physically, but Full Metal Jacket isn’t a star vehicle, and the presence of one of the world’s most famous men would have been more of a distraction than a boost. There’s also the small matter of the star’s thick Austrian accent, which would have clashed with the American focus of the story.
While a Schwarzenegger/Kubrick team-up would have certainly been interesting, everything worked out just fine in the end, except on The Running Man: that movie bombed.
