Arnold Schwarzenegger says “SNL”'s Hans and Franz helped others accept his accent: 'They legitimized it'
Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't just have a good sense of humor about Saturday Night Live's Hans and Franz sketches. He appreciated them, he said in a new interview.
Hans and Franz is a topic that keeps surfacing recently. Schwarzenegger talked about the sketches when he appeared on Conan O'Brien's podcast, and so, of course, they had to be discussed when he popped into Dana Carvey and David Spade's Fly on the Wall podcast.
"To me, it was heaven," Schwarzenegger told the SNL alums, "because you have to understand that when I first wanted to get into acting, one of the first things they said was, 'This won't work.' No one in America has ever made it that had an accent. No one could be a leading man or anything like this. It's really tough. People want to hear someone talk like John Wayne, like Clint Eastwood or Al Pacino, those were the guys."
The former California governor continued, "Then I realized that I had to make the accent something, not to hide it, but to actually make something of it. But then out of nowhere, without me controlling it, [Hans and Franz] came along. And they legitimized it, because now there was someone that took the subject of [an] accent and had a good time with it. Not to make fun of it, but to actually entertain people with it. I always said from that point on, it became much more accepted, the whole thing and really became much easier for me."
While Carvey spent the early part of the podcast doing his Hans voice and reciting lines from the sketch, he appeared to genuinely appreciate the sentiment, saying he didn't know that Schwarzenegger felt that way.
The trio also discussed the time Schwarzenegger invited Hans and Franz to join him at the White House for the Great American Workout. But it was before that, when Schwarzenegger appeared on SNL, that Carvey first found out how the Terminator star felt about their sketch.
"We didn't know how you were going to react," Carvey said. "They said Arnold's waiting down the hall... So, Kevin [Nealon] and I are a little nervous. We went in, and you're in some chair, and you lean back, and you go, 'How do I do the accent again, fellas?' Then we knew you loved it."
Everyone almost had a chance to love Hans and Franz a little more, because the buff fitness gurus almost starred in a movie. Earlier this year, Carvey and Nealon even read some of the script on O'Brien's podcast. We can dream.
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