Arnold Schwarzenegger is extraordinary. His face is so familiar, so cartoonishly iconographic, that simply to look at him feels like falling headlong into an Andy Warhol painting. He seems to have pectorals in his cheekbones and a six-pack in his lips. Set with cement-solid purpose, he resembles some heroic Soviet statue, giving nothing away, save for indomitable purpose. He seems to be more an object than a man. Something to be worshipped rather than loved. Perhaps that's the way he always wanted it.
Up close, he is - as you'd expect - big, tall and wide. But the biggest thing about him is his presence. It is gargantuan, presidential in its authority. Like everything about him, this authority is contrived - but so seamlessly contrived as to appear utterly natural. Even before anyone ever believed in him, Arnie believed completely in himself and set out to turn himself into a myth. Eventually we all bought into it. The myth, helped nicely along by his carefully sculpted body and stoic Aryan face, is the self-created fable of invincibility.
"For me and my career," he says, "the image has been everything. More important than the reality. The most powerful thing is what people perceive and believe about me."
When I met Schwarzenegger last week, he'd marched into Britain to promote his latest movie, End of Days. Directed by Peter Hyams, it is a millennial tale of a former cop (played by Arnie) trying to save the world from Satan. The initial attention-grabbing plan for the film's premiere was to have Arnie drive a speedboat up the Thames and into Surrey Quays, in London's Docklands, where the premiere was being held in the local UCI multiplex - to be greeted by a huge crowd of locals.
Sadly, the speedboat ride was rained off. But, still, Arnie made one hell of an entrance. As he and co-star Gabriel Byrne swaggered down the 12-foot-wide red carpets that led into the cinema, they were greeted with positively hysterical acclaim. Hordes of scruffy south-east London herberts bawled out, "Hasta la vista, baby, hasta la vista" with the kind of dedicated passion they might normally reserve for, "We are Millwall. No one likes us. We don't care." For a moment, you could almost be convinced that Arnie was still the biggest movie star in the world. For a moment, just for a moment, he was right back up there again.
Inside the cinema, minutes before the movie rolled, Arnie mounted the stage and gave the assembled critics, celebrities and hangers-on a little speech. More like a pep talk really. On just how great the new movie was. He ended with the words, "Goodnight, London, I'll be back." Then, without further ado, the movie began. And then he was up there on the screen, sounding the same, looking the same. For the first 20 minutes, it's hard to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
With Arnie, of course, it's always been difficult to know where image ends and reality begins. He's never given the impression of being like anybody else. Unlike, say, David Bowie or Madonna, whose reinvention of themselves always seemed playful and quite deliberately theatrical, Arnie's self-invention has always appeared to come out of a raw need to prove himself. His metamorphosis from smalltown Austrian weakling to champion bodybuilder, then Hollywood superstar, has always been inextricably linked to his sense of survival and superiority. Possibly one and the same thing in Arnie's case.
During his early bodybuilding days, he famously remarked, in words all too reminiscent of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathrustra: "I look down on people who are helpless." So, when Arnie is asked what frightens him, he sounds somewhat unconvincing when he replies, "I think the same things as other people. I think everything that scares anyone else scares me. I'm not like you see me on the screen - a guy that's not scared of anything. I'm as vulnerable as anyone else is, and that's it." It is probably the only lie he tells during the course of our interview.
Arnie, so the legend goes, worked out and built himself up - to the point where he became larger than life. A living myth. A living legend. The legend is largely true. Arnie, who dominated the global box office for more than 15 years, did indeed turn himself from a skinny Austrian nobody into an American Ubermensch. To this day, he holds dual nationality. As an Austrian and an American, he exhibits both Teutonic determination and new-world optimism. He once famously proclaimed that, though he was born in Austria, it was America that made him. And America is where Arnie's ambitions were always focused.
When he was just 13, he told his father he would run away to Hollywood to become a film star. His father, presumably a good judge of character, believed him. Purpose, perseverance and control are what Arnie is all about. That, in a nutshell, is what that look and body convey. Schwarzenegger is not so much an actor as an athlete, perpetually attempting to outperform his competitors and outrun himself. He assaulted Hollywood with the same pathological focus and missionary zeal he previously brought to his body-building career.
However, once serious to the point of being po-faced, he has of late introduced irony and self-deprecating humour to his repertoire. Particularly in his dealings with the media. From his earliest days in Hollywood, he demonstrated a remarkable ability for self-promotion. "I'm a salesman," he once claimed. "I know exactly what it takes." It would seem that little has changed. The product is still Arnie and, boy, is he going to sell it. Whatever it takes.
Up close and personal, he is indefatigably affable and humorous. An easy man to warm to. It's only when you later step back and listen to his disembodied voice on tape that you begin to suspect that all this good humour is just part of the hard sell. It's the same with his appearance. Dressed in a long black jacket and dark trousers, with immaculate two-day stubble, he looks exactly as he does in End of Days. With anyone else, you might suppose this was simply a happy coincidence. With Arnie, you kind of know that this perfectly dishevelled chic is all part of the act. He wants us to believe in his new, world-saving role. With Arnie, it's now soft sell as hard sell. It's simply what's required at a point when his career is, undeniably, on the slide.
Like fellow action heroes Stallone and Willis, Arnie attempted to cast himself against type during the 1990s, in movies such as Junior, Kindergarten Cop and Jingle All the Way. But the humour of these films depended wholly on a single joke. A superhuman Terminator like Schwarzenegger being pregnant, in charge of toddlers, or succumbing to the pressures of Christmas shopping. Stallone and Willis had always played parts that suggested a certain emotional frailty. Arnie, on the other hand, had become famous for playing an emotionless automaton. By the mid-90s, he was trapped.
"I didn't consciously attempt to avoid doing action movies," he says. "For a while, I wanted to try something different. But I couldn't have kept making the kind of action movies I was doing in the 80s. Action movies are different now. The audience expects them to be different. They still like the action, they still like the visual effects, the great stunts, and all those things, but they also like it to be a thinking person's movie."
Since 1997, following a string of flops, a heart operation and the sudden slump of Planet Hollywood, the restaurant chain he part-owns, he has started to look as vulnerable as that other former icon of invincibility, Mike Tyson. In LA's bars and studios, Perrier-sipping cynics reckon Arnie's time has come and gone. Box office returns would suggest that they are not entirely wrong. End of Days was widely regarded as his make or break. His do or die. Arnie's last stand. And End of Days is not doing all that well.
Imagine a hybrid of The Omen and Commando. Or a shotgun marriage between Stigmata and The World is Not Enough. While the latter two movies, released at the same time as Arnie's latest, have cleaned up at the box-office, End of Days has yet to come anywhere near to recouping its $85m investment.
Having built up his edifice on the illusion of almost Hitlerian supremacy, Arnie, like Tyson, is finding that the myth only holds up so long as the public can be convinced of that supremacy. As soon as things take a downward turn, the illusion is shattered. His heart surgery served to prove that Arnie was not quite the invulnerable man-machine his roles had led us to believe he was. His recent movie flops served as a reminder that no movie star, even Arnie, is immune to box-office failure. While appearing to be acutely aware of this, Arnie has turned what might to others seem to be an insuperable obstacle into simply another challenge. He gives the impression that nothing, not even failure, can come between him and success.
"There's two points here," he tells me. "One is connected with the physical baggage that I bring to the table. When people see you almost as a machine, then they are shocked and amazed when something goes wrong with your body. Like when I underwent the heart surgery. Because I was originally known as the guy with the perfect body, people found it hard to believe that my body was as vulnerable as the next guy's. After something like that, I wasn't so much concerned how it would affect me. It was far more important to convince the world that it hadn't affected me. To convince the world I was OK and that I was back - that was the big concern for me. That's why I took on the role in End of Days. It's a very physical role.
"The second thing is about box-office. I think that you can make movies that are hits and movies that are failures. The only difference is that, if you make a few failures in a row, people start to doubt you. I don't think there's anyone that expects to have hits all the time. From time to time, you'll make a decision that is wrong, or sometimes the director does not see the picture clearly."
There was a time in the late 80s and early 90s when Schwarzenegger movies sold themselves. Back then, he would do the bare minimum of promotional interviews. Nowadays, despite the fact that he is more famous than Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman - who have no need and even less desire to talk to the press - Arnie has made himself globally available. He travels the world with a team of PRs and minders. By all accounts, he expects his team to be as ruthlessly organised and winningly ebullient as himself.
"I don't take any shit," he declares, sounding much as he did in the first Terminator movie. "I have to be a bit of a five star general. I have no time for slacking off or failure. Everyone knows that I'm a tolerant guy. But everyone also knows I don't like laziness. If you want to be part of the team, then you have to go and kick butt.
"If you don't like that kind of pressure then get the hell out. Like, if someone flies with me to seven different countries, I don't want them telling me they've got problems with sleeping. Or they've got jetlag, or they're tired. Who cares? Go home, man. Go to bed. We'll bring someone else in. That's not what I need. I have to be up. Sometimes I have to fly 13 hours a day. So I need a team that is as enthusiastic and as quick and as organised as I am. I demand certain things. I don't blame anyone if they mess up. I just have to bring someone else in that can do the job." A very reasonable man, then. He doesn't blame people. He just sacks them.
In the past, Arnie did not particularly care who he talked to, providing they were carefully chosen and there weren't too many of them. For End of Days, however, he has covered the waterfront, allowing everyone from The Big Issue to Tina Brown's Talk magazine into his presence. Where previously he might only have appeared on Johnny Carson, he's now perfectly happy to shoot the shit with Jonathan Ross, Johnny Vaughan, et al.
To give him the benefit of the doubt for a moment, this media saturation might just indicate a new-found enthusiasm on his part to communicate with as many as possible. On the other hand, the almost Grecian opulence of the End of Days post-movie premiere party had the vague whiff of desperation about it. Half-a-dozen smouldering cars hung from the ceiling as rubber-clad go-go dancers leapt from vehicle to vehicle. Every possible drink was free. A dodgems rink had been installed. The chill-out room had been done out as a Satanic chapel, complete with three four-poster beds for the more carnally inclined. All well and good. Except that End of Days, the movie, is frankly a long way from justifying this kind of hype.
Still, you can't blame Arnie for the big push. Essentially, despite his more media-friendly profile, he is the same as ever. Pushing himself and selling himself, in competition with no one but himself. His problem is, however, that he is now trapped by the persona he created more than 30 years ago in an Austrian gym. Valued at more than $120m, married to a Kennedy, with an art collection to match Jeffrey Archer's, he shouldn't lose too much sleep over the fact that his movies no longer rake in the pot like they used to. And, to be fair to him, he doesn't. Arnie is eternally, almost supernaturally, optimistic. Things will work out. He will be back.
It is rumoured that he might yet stand for the American senate, or even the Austrian presidency; rumours he chooses neither to confirm nor deny. With his movie career in precarious balance, a move into politics might not seem like a bad option. Far-fetched perhaps. But, then again, given America's proclivity for politician actors and Austrian political tendencies, he would seem to have at least an outside chance.
Whatever he decides, it will have little to do with either showbiz or politics and everything to do with his desire to be king of the hill. "Being Number One is still the important thing," he says. "Being a winner. That's what gives me the most satisfaction. Because, really, there's nothing quite like winning."
Ask him if he expects to get back on top and he flashes you a look that says, "Don't doubt it for a moment." With a look like that, the kind of look that brooks no argument, how could he possibly fail? Because failure is strictly off the map. "I'll be back," he smiles, echoing his most famous and oft-repeated line, with a knowing wink.
The screaming kids that greet him at the south-east London cinema still believe in that look, still believe that Arnie is the invincible Aryan Ubermensch all of us once believed in. However, behind Arnie's wink and smile, there's surely a man who knows that he's got further to fall than any of us.
