Culture news Arnold Schwarzenegger was so bad in his first film released 55 years ago that it was completely dubbed
Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t always so successful on film sets, he even had to be completely dubbed because he was so bad.
Terminator star Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t always have the build for his roles. Although he has a solid career thanks to The Expendables saga and especially Terminator, his debut was not as successful. Before becoming known with Conan the Barbarian (1982), he started in an even more modest film: Hercules in New York in 1970. But not everything went as planned, especially for Schwarzenegger, whose performance was considered catastrophic.
A problematic accent
As mentioned, it is in Hercules in New York that Arnold Schwarzenegger takes his first steps in the world of cinema. The film tells the story of Hercules, the demigod of Greek mythology, who becomes bored with his life on Mount Olympus and decides to come down to Earth. Despite the warnings of his father, Zeus, Hercules lands in New York, where he quickly discovers that the modern world is very different from that of the gods. Schwarzenegger plays the role main character, but his famous Austrian accent posed a problem during filming.
At the time, the director and the entire film crew were worried that his accent would interfere with his performance. Despite his acting skills, no one could understand Arnold Schwarzenegger. So they decided to have it completely doubled. Unfortunately, the voice actor they hired was not credited. It is his voice that we can hear in the version shown in the cinema. Fortunately, a restored version with Schwarzenegger’s voice has since been released, giving us an idea of what audiences missed. We’ll let you compare the final result.
A complicated start to a career
Whether with the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger or that of this mysterious voice actor, Hercules in New York received very bad reviews upon its release. With a rating of 3.3 on IMDB, Hercules in New York is the lowest-reviewed film of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s film career, falling just behind Batman & Robin, which earned a 3.8 rating. In 2017, in an interview with Insider, Schwarzenegger commented on the beginnings of his career and prefers to leave them behind him. “In the movie, my name was Arnold Strong. It was really stupid. At one point I re-watched the movie because my kids were watching it. It was very stupid,” he explained.