The internet is filled with facts, both true and otherwise. In Film Trivia Fact Check, we’ll browse the depths of the web’s most user-generated trivia boards and wikis and put them under the microscope. How true are the IMDb Trivia pages? You want the truth? Can you handle the truth? We’re about to find out.
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Claim: Bluesky user @bigfatdaddy writes, “When Terminator became a hit, Arnold wanted to provide his voice for the dubbed German release, but it was determined that his rural Austrian accent was too hillbilly. I only want this confirmed, not debunked.”
Rating: We’re sorry to disappoint, but this is inconclusive and likely untrue. While plausible, it’s highly unlikely that this story would happen to two different members of the Terminator cast.
Context: English-speaking internet users are fascinated by Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking German, particularly in The Terminator. German actor Thomas Danneberg, who recorded dubs for numerous actors with distinctive voices, including Sylvester Stallone and Nick Nolte, provided voiceover for the Deutschland version of the film, which only fuels interest. Social video sites are filled with clips of the Austrian bodybuilder, real estate tycoon, and former governor speaking the language. But if this story about The Terminator were true, it’s highly likely that Schwarzenegger himself would’ve told it in plain English.
Schwarzenegger sounding too much like a farmer to record the German-language dub of Terminator is one of those factoids that’s been bouncing around the internet for almost 20 years. It likely sprang from a 2009 episode of the British panel show QI.
On the series F episode “France,” host Stephen Fry quizzes the panelists, “Why do Spaniards lisp when they speak?” The most common answer, that the king had a lisp and his subjects were mimicking him, is false. “If it were true, then they would lisp all the time, but they don’t,” Fry says, “except there are very small areas where they lisp on the ‘S’ as well, but that’s considered very bumpkinish in Spanish. So, it’s just one of those stories that’s got around that isn’t true at all.” Something between “very bumpkinish” and “isn’t true at all” triggered panelist Hugh Dennis’ memory.
“Do you know that story about Arnold Schwarzenegger, when they made Terminator and they made a German version of it, and he said, ‘Can I please dub it back into German? Because I speak German,'” Dennis recalls. “And they said, ‘No,’ because he’s Austrian and he sounds like a farmer.”
In the years since, the story made its way to an ESL website, then a post on Reddit’s Today I Learned subreddit, which cites the ESL site. It’s bounced around IMDb, TikTok, and pretty much anywhere that doesn’t bother to check its sources. In 2019, Quora user Ed Qualls explained why the claim is logically sound. Schwarzenegger would sound rural to German audiences because he was raised in the farming village of Thal. “So, yes, Arnold does speak German,” he writes. “But, no, certainly not well enough to be considered broadcast-quality, echtes Hochdeutsch: Standard German.”
That would probably settle it, except for the fact that this actually happened to Michael Biehn.
Over the years, Biehn has frequently retold the story of how he nearly lost the role of Kyle Reese because of a lingering accent, and so has director James Cameron. “Michael came in to read for us and he gave us the best reading of any of the actors we’d seen but it was with a Southern accent,” Cameron told Schwarzenegger in a 1992 interview. “We talked to his agent, and very politely said, ‘Michael’s very good, but we really don’t want him to seem so specific, that he comes from the South, because he’s from the future.’ The agent said, ‘What accent? He doesn’t have a Southern accent.’ It turned out he’d been reading for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof that morning, and he hadn’t shaken the accent.”
Still, it is possible that this also happened to Arnold, so we reached out to TheArnoldFans, a 30-year-old Schwarzenegger fansite, to see if they had any more information. “Arnold loves telling stories about making Terminator,” writes Ryan “The Gillinator” Gillen via email. “He’ll talk about how O.J. Simpson was originally supposed to be the Terminator, but no one thought he’d be convincing as a killing machine, or how he didn’t want to say the line ‘I’ll be back’ because he thought it sounded weird and a robot would say ‘I will be back.’ My point is, if the story was true, Arnold would’ve talked about it himself at some point. And it’s not like he would not say anything out of embarrassment; he’s very self-deprecating and laughs at himself all the time—especially regarding his accent and how people couldn’t pronounce his name, calling himself ‘Schwarzenschnitzel’ sometimes.”
To The Gillinator’s point, there are plenty of clips of Schwarzenegger telling these stories. Most of them are in Netflix’s 2023 Arnold documentary series, but not this one. Ironically, to help confirm, The Gillinator employed the help of Skynet itself: the “Arnold Intelligence” chatbot on Arnold’s Pump Club fitness app, which came up negative. “Its sources are basically everything Arnold has ever written in books, online, or posts and comments in his app, so that’s pretty definitive,” he continues. This might be the first use-case for AI (Arnold Intelligence), as it brings up another good point: “He says he has never done the German dub on any of his films, so there was nothing unique about Terminator,” writes Gillen. “But he did speak German quite a bit in a scene in Escape Plan, which was one of his favorite scenes.”
There is one final ripple to the story, which leads us to believe it’s a conflation: The infamous Terminator 3 deleted scene that explains why the cyborg has an accent. In the scene, the model for the prototype, Chief Master Sergeant William Candy (played by Schwarzenegger), speaks with a ridiculous Southern drawl. Unsurprisingly, the Terminator wiki cites this scene as a joke about the initial controversy, and that Samuel L. Jackson actually provides Candy’s voice, but that’s a fact check for another day.
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