Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed in a recent YouTube video that he had botched open-heart surgery about three months before cameras started filming on “Terminator: Dark Fate,” the 2019 action tentpole that served as the sixth installment in the long-running franchise. It was Schwarzenegger’s third open heart surgery, and it was supposed to be “non-invasive.”
Schwarzenegger remembered the doctor telling him when he woke up, “We made a mistake and poked through the heart wall and you had internal bleeding and we had to open you up very quickly to save your life.”
The actor was “really freaking out,” but he realized he would not be able to “roll the clock back” to prevent the mistake and thus he dove head first into his recovery.
“I was in the middle of a disaster,” Schwarzenegger said. “So now how do I get out of it? You have to shift gears. Collect yourself, shift gears, and say, ‘Okay what I need to do now is get out of this hospital.’ How do I get out of the hospital is getting out of my bed and start walking.”
“I looked like an idiot, you know, waddling around in the hallways, but the bottom line was I was getting going because the doctors said, ‘You have to exercise your lungs because if you get pneumonia, you can die,'” he continued. “I wanted to get really going with exercise, get out of the house as quickly as possible, and then get going with the training again because three months later I started with ‘Terminator 6,’ so I had to be in shape. I had to move around, run around, lift things up, do the fight scenes, and all of these kinds of things.”
Schwarzenegger credits his “positive attitude” and the support system at the hospital with getting him back in shape to film “Terminator: Dark Fate,” which ended up being his final outing in the franchise.
“The franchise is not done. I’m done,” the actor said earlier this year. “I got the message loud and clear that the world wants to move on with a different theme when it comes to‘TheTerminator.’ Someone has to come up with a great idea.”
Watch a video of Schwarzenegger’s recovery below.
