The one role Arnold Schwarzenegger will always regret turning down: “I can’t commit to that”
When it comes to regrets, Arnold Schwarzenegger admits he has a few. The iconic action star and former “Governator” has been candid over the years about mistakes in his personal life and has occasionally walked back insensitive public comments. However, he’s not someone who often confesses to career regrets—after all, he’s one of the most successful stars in history. Interestingly, though, there was one film he turned down in the 1990s that he now wishes he’d given more of a chance before dismissing it out of hand.
Throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s, Schwarzenegger’s rise in Hollywood was unstoppable. The Austrian Oak went from an unknown bodybuilder with no acting experience—speaking English in an extremely thick accent—to the biggest action star in the industry in less than a decade. Amusingly, he still spoke English in that inimitable accent, but that only became part of his unique charm. Audiences couldn’t get enough of his mix of muscles and mirth in films like Conan the Barbarian, Commando, Predator, and the Terminator series.
By the mid-1990s, though, Schwarzenegger’s grip on the action crown had begun to slip. In 1996, he made Jingle All the Way, a Christmas family movie that critics eviscerated, and Eraser, an action flick that performed well at the box office but was also critically derided. Then, a year later, he starred as Mr Freeze in Batman & Robin, an undeniable debacle that killed the franchise for nearly a decade before Christopher Nolan got his hands on it.
In truth, Schwarzenegger’s status as the number one action star never quite recovered from this dicey period. However, a case could be made that it would have lasted a few years longer if he’d agreed to star in a 1996 action blockbuster that made a staggering $335million worldwide. Hell, it even launched the action career of the oddball star who took the role Schwarzenegger rejected.
“Jerry Bruckheimer came to me with the script for The Rock that Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage ended up doing,” Schwarzenegger admitted to The Sun. “I was offered the Nicolas Cage part.”
To Schwarzenegger’s dismay, the script he was sent for the Alcatraz-set thriller was a scant 80 pages long, with “scribbles and hand-written stuff saying, ‘This is shit,’ let’s not do this page, let’s rewrite this.” He couldn’t get a bead on his character, the eccentrically named FBI chemical weapons specialist Stanley Goodspeed, and therefore didn’t feel the project was in a position to get behind.
“I looked at this script and said, ‘What is that?'” Schwarzenegger chuckled. “‘I can’t commit to that. Why don’t you get your act together and come back with a good script?'”
To Schwarzenegger’s chagrin, though, the production well and truly got its act together. The script was polished – by Quentin Tarantino, no less – and Bad Boys helmer Michael Bay signed on to direct. Fresh off his Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas, Cage agreed to play Goodspeed alongside Sean Connery as the only man to escape from Alcatraz island. Throw in Ed Harris as a rogue Navy Seal commander taking hostages on the island and threatening to launch nuclear rockets at the San Francisco Bay Area, and a modern action classic was born.
When Schwarzenegger finally watched the film he’d been pitched in such a half-assed way, he was shocked by how good it was. “I really loved that movie; I thought it turned out fantastic,” he gushed.
However, he did concede that Cage’s performance as Goodspeed was so unexpectedly brilliant that he couldn’t imagine anyone else in the part. “By the way, Nicolas Cage did an extraordinary job,” he stated. “I don’t know if I’d be able to do as good a job as he did, but I was mad that I turned down that role because it was really a great role.”
It’s enough to make you wonder if there’s a parallel universe out there in which Schwarzenegger made The Rock, then followed it up with Con Air and Face/Off instead of Cage. It’s not hard to imagine they would have reinforced his position as the undisputed action king of Hollywood a lot better than the weaker efforts he did make, such as End of Days and Collateral Damage.
