‘Sick' Arnold Schwarzenegger Wanted to Be '#1 in Killing,' Got Carried Away in Bloodlust

Back in the 1990s, blockbusters were very different from how they are today — and male actors had very different standards, too. Men like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger ruled Hollywood, and everything was about their adrenaline-fueled action movies with numerous casualties and raw annihilation of other people.

The action icons of the 1990s were famously competing with each other, and each of them wanted to be tougher, cooler, and stronger than others — both on the big screen and in real life. This often led them to become actual rivals…but sometimes, the consequences were way too funny, like in this case with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

After the phenomenal success of the first Terminator movie, Schwarzenegger obviously wanted to keep going and build an entire franchise out of it. However, he also really wanted to outdo Stallone in terms of his movies’ brutality, and on the set of Terminator 2, the actor horrified director James Cameron with his bloodlust.

“[Since] I was killing 68 people in the first one — the second one, I have to kill 150. We go up with the count and the massacre, and we cut their throats and kill them and shoot them and the cannon and this and that — run them over with the car. I said, ‘I’ve got to outdo Stallone!’ I’ve gotta be #1 in killing the amount of people on the screen,” Schwarzenegger explained to The Wrap.

The actor was overflowing with ideas about how he would kill all those dozens of people in the new movie, and his bloodthirsty drive spooked James Cameron. ‘Arnold, stop it. You’re a very sick guy,’ the director told his lead star, which the latter recalled during the interview with light-hearted humor. Quite a sick guy he was!

Admittedly, the director later tuned down his Terminator’s body count in the movie, but we don’t know just how much. After all, Cameron had an entire Arnold Schwarzenegger looming over him and claiming he had to outdo Stallone!

Source: The Wrap