Having now reached a point where anybody on the planet would be able to know exactly who you were trying to channel with a well-placed “NYEAAH!!!” spoken in a guttural and garbled vaguely European cadence, it would be fair to say Arnold Schwarzenegger has one of the most distinctive, recognizable, and oft-imitated accents on the planet.
While Chris Pratt is about the only person adamant he won’t be busting out an impression based on his status as the Austrian Oak’s son-in-law, the sheer volume of movie, TV, and video game projects to feature either a thinly-veiled or blatant facsimile of the action icon’s brogue is nothing short of staggering, and indicative of the impact he’s left on pop culture.
However, as revealed by FUBAR co-star Monica Barbaro in an interview with Collider, Schwarzenegger remains adamant that none of the many, many, pretenders to the throne has ever come close to replicating the real thing.
“I was working on his voice and I was asking him about, you know, I was like, “Will you say the lines that I say of yours in your voice?” And he was like, “The thing about an Arnold impression is that it doesn’t actually sound like me.” It’s actually turned into its own sort of thing, and I was watching videos, watching other people’s impersonations, Bill Hader has probably the best one, and I was like, “Oh, yeah!” It’s almost taken on its own character, in a way, if you really, like pound for pound or word for word, listen to an impression versus the way he actually speaks it. He doesn’t really quite sound the way the impersonations sound. So from there, it was just sort of like, “Okay, have fun with whatever version of it you want to.”
It’s true that finding a spot-on Schwarzenegger is a lot more difficult than it sounds given how popular mimicking this native speaking voice has become, but at least he knows how to have a little fun with the concept of being one o the most heavily-imitated folks in the entire world.