Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent remains one of his most iconic qualities, and the actor now recalls his failed attempts to remove it with a coach.

SUMMARY

 Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals that he worked with numerous speech coaches early on in his career, including one to remove his accent.
 The coaching evidently failed, however, and Schwarzenegger said that is accent became ” an asset.”
 The combination of Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent and his physique helped establish him as a unique kind of action star, and it ultimately set him apart from his Hollywood contemporaries and helped his career.

Arnold Schwarzenegger recalls working with a coach to shed his now-iconic Austrian accent. Bursting onto the Hollywood scene in the early 1980s, Schwarzenegger is now known as one of the quintessential action stars.

The actor, whose accent is instantly-recognizable, is best known for roles in hit movies like Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Commando, Predator, and Total Recall, among a host of others.

During a recent interview on The Graham Norton Show, Schwarzenegger reveals that, early on in his career, he worked with a number of different coaches for his speech, including one who attempted to remove all traces of his accent.

The actor details some of the lessons and speech drills he participated in with the coach, recalling how Hollywood producers thought his accent would be a hindrance to his career. Check out Schwarzenegger’s comment below:

“I had an English coach and an acting coach and a speech coach and an accent-removal coach, who has passed away since then, but I should have otherwise gotten my money back.

“The bottom line is I worked on it. I remember he’d say, ‘You know you always say three [incorrectly.] It’s three, with a T-H.’ So he had me say three thousand three hundred and thirty-three and one third with the T-H and not with the S.

“So things like that, I was saying things over and over again — it was very helpful but it didn’t get rid of my accent. But the funny thing was all the stuff that was said, the Hollywood producers and the directors and all the geniuses, they were saying that this was an obstacle for me to become a leading man, [but it] became an asset.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Accent Is One Of His Greatest Strengths

Before making it big in Hollywood, Schwarzenegger had built a name for himself as a bodybuilder. His physique evidently gave him big action star potential, but, clearly, Hollywood executives didn’t think his accent would work for audiences.

There hadn’t, after all, really been anyone like Schwarzenegger who had taken off in Hollywood before.

Conan the Barbarian is one of Schwarzenegger’s first big movies, and it features his accent on full display. The accent actually works for the movie, giving the character a distinctly non-American feel, which ultimately fits the character.

After that 1982 classic, the actor would go on to star in The Terminator in 1984, another film in which his accent is a major strength.

The accent immediately sets Schwarzenegger apart from other actors and, combined with his physique, it helped to establish him as something of a novel Hollywood phenomenon.

Schwarzenegger‘s most iconic lines are also so memorable in part due to his accent, including, of course, “I’ll be back” and “Get to the choppa!”

 Since the 1980s, Schwarzenegger’s accent has remained distinctive, but it has also become the subject of skits, spoofs, and parodies. The actor, however, has embraced all of this, and it’s only further enhanced and contributed to his star power, public persona, and mythology.