At the height of his 1980s and 90s popularity, Arnold Schwarzenegger fully embodied action cinema with a string of awesome blockbusters leveraging his charisma and colossal physique. These days, he’s slightly stepped back from the limelight, but is now making a big comeback in Netflix’s FUBAR.
This action comedy series sees Schwarzenegger playing a CIA agent whose retirement plans are thrown into a spin when he discovers his daughter is secretly a spy. It’s got shades of True Lies, and we’re happy to see Arnold back in action, even if some things have changed since his action heyday.
For one, back in the day, his movies used real guns modified to shoot blanks. Nowadays, particularly after the Rust tragedy, it’s more common to use replica rubber guns and add muzzle-flash with CGI. In an interview with Yahoo! Schwarzenegger explained that FUBAR used a combination of the two, using real guns for close-up shots:
“We used make-believe guns when there were stunts involved where people got hit with the gun or if we were far enough away from each other. We used the whole gamut of different guns, because with close-ups you can tell the real stuff from the fake stuff.”
FUBAR co-star Gabriel Luna had nothing but praise for working with the action legend, hinting that we’re about to get a big Terminator 2: Judgement Day reference in the show:
“By the end of the shoot, he’s walking in with a shotgun having pulled it out of a package of roses and is blasting it off. I’m looking at him do this, and he’s not blinking at all. I was just like, ‘This guy’s obviously done this before.'”
But as for whether super-strict gun safety on set is really necessary, Schwarzenegger doesn’t mince his words:
“It’s all nonsense. The fact of the matter is that there were always safety precautions in place. But you can have all the laws and all the regulations in place, and if people don’t follow them you have nothing. When you’re dealing with cars or with weapons, you can get killed if you make a mistake. If you do stunt driving, you have to be very careful and you have to rehearse it and everyone has to play by the rules.
“That’s exactly what we did on True Lies and we do the same thing on FUBAR. Every single day where we used weapons, they were shown to us. What was inside the barrel, what kind of ammunition was in there and what the magazine looked like. Over and over — it was absolutely like a school. And we didn’t come close to an accident or anything like that.”
Whether there’ll ever be a blanket ban on using real firearms on TV and movie sets remains to be seen, particularly as we don’t yet have all the answers on exactly what went down on Rust. That said, FUBAR seems to have done it right, with the on-set armorer clearly doing their job professionally and to very high standards.
FUBAR is now available to stream on Netflix.
