Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent is one of the most recognizable things about the 76-year-old action star.
When he was just starting out however, he attempted to rid himself of the accent that came with being born in Austria.
Appearing on “The Graham Norton Show” in promotion of his new book, “Be Useful (Seven Tools For Live),” he told the host he even hired someone to work on changing how he spoke, according to EW.
“I had an English coach and an acting coach and a speech coach and an accent-removal coach, who has passed away since then, but I should have otherwise gotten my money back,” he said.
“The bottom line is, I worked on it,” he recalled about his time starting out in American films in the ‘70s. “I remember he’d say, ‘You know you always say s’ree. It’s three, with a T-H.’ So he had me say, ‘Three thousand three hundred and thirty-three and one-third,’ with the T-H and not with the S.”
Norton commended him on his pronunciation of the sentence, to which Schwarzenegger jokingly replied, “After 5,000 years right?”
The “Terminator” star did say hanging on to the accent ended up working out.
“The funny thing was all the stuff that they said, the Hollywood producers and the directors and all the geniuses, they were saying this was an obstacle for me to become a leading man, became an asset,” he said.