When Arnold Schwarzenegger bit a dead vulture on set
Arnold Schwarzenegger faced a challenge when transitioning to an action hero role because finding stunt doubles with similar proportions to convincingly stand in for him during intense sequences was difficult due to his unique physique.
As a result, the ‘Austrian Oak’ put himself through the wringer during his initial ascent up the Hollywood ladder, suffering his fair share of injuries along the way. Being obscenely muscular doesn’t guarantee anybody immunity from harm, something Schwarzenegger experienced during an arduous early shoot.
Playing a hulking warrior was right in his wheelhouse, but Conan the Barbarian still conspired to push the future A-list megastar to the brink. Director John Milius wanted his swords-and-sorcery flick to be as grounded, gritty, brutal, and realistic as possible, leaving the leading man with no other option but to commit himself entirely to the role.
“I learned to ride horses and camels and elephants. I learned how to jump from large rocks, how to climb and swing from long ropes, how to fall from a height,” he wrote in his self-help memoir Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. “I basically went to another vocational school, this one for aspiring action heroes.”
On the plus side, being dropped in at the deep end proved worth it in the long run when he became the face of the entire action genre throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, regardless of the sacrifices he was forced to make along the way, which included some truly gnarly incidents that leaned into Conan’s status as a grizzled, hardened, and ferocious survivor.
“Then on top of that, Milius had me doing all kinds of terrible shit. I crawled through rocks, take after take, until my forearms bled. I ran from wild dogs that managed to catch me and pull me into a thorn bush,” he continued. “I bit a real, dead vulture that required I wash my mouth out with alcohol after each take. (PETA would have a field day with that one.). On one of the first days of filming, I tore a gash on my back that required 40 stitches.”
Quite why it was decided that Schwarzenegger needed to bite into a very real and very dead bird of prey on multiple occasions is anybody’s guess, but then again, it’s right there in the title that he was playing a barbaric sort. Still, it seems fairly unnecessary, and it’s not as if Conan the Barbarian didn’t have a props department that could have knocked up a fake vulture fairly quickly and inexpensively.
The end result did take his on-screen career to the next level, which at least means Schwarzenegger didn’t suffer in vain having been wracked by injury and disgust by what Milius required of him.
