3. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator
Even for Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s hard to get much more bulked up than “former bodybuilding world champion” and “seven-time Mr. Olympia winner”. But Schwarzenegger’s work on Predator went above and beyond. Schwarzenegger worked out like a beast before filming, and continued to give his character Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer even more muscle definition once the cameras started rolling. As actor Bill Duke told The Hollywood Reporter on the 30th anniversary of Predator, Schwarzenegger shipped a gym to Mexico for the shoot so that he could work out at any time he wanted.
Consider: If there’s one one iconic moment from Predator, it’s when Schwarzenegger greets Carl Weathers with the line “Dillon, you son of a bitch!” as the camera zooms on Schwarzenegger’s bulging biceps.
“Arnold once knocked on my door at 5:30, woke me up,” Duke said. “I started lifting with them and they all would start yelling at me to lift more weights and more reps. And that night, I was in so much pain that the next morning when they came to my door and started banging, I pretended that I slept through it so that I wouldn’t have to lift with them anymore.”
“I think that phrase ‘manly men’ was coined down there,” screenwriter Jim Thomas told THR. “I think it was Arnold that kept saying (in Arnold voice) ‘manly men’. You had that cast, and those guys were all pretty impressive. Then you had all the stuntmen who had to double these guys and do all of the stunts. So every morning you had all of these stuntmen and all the cast down there trying to get a good pump on. It was kind of comical, these guys are all trying to outdo each other.”
Want to get jacked like Arnold? Try his Mr. Olympia chest and back workout from 1974.
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