Arnold Schwarzenegger On How Danny DeVito Made Him Forget His Lines During The Making Of Twins: “He’s A Brutal Prankster”

Everyone knows Danny DeVito is a funny guy but, according to Arnold Schwarzenegger, his Twins and Junior co-star, he is also “a brutal prankster”.

When a fan asked the former Governor of California in his monthly newsletter about his favourite on-set story, Arnie, 73, cited an incident during the making of Ivan Reitman’s 1988 comedy Twins, where they played Julius and Vincent, fraternal twins conceived from a genetic experiment.

"He’s a brutal prankster, and he’s as funny in real life as he is on the screen," Arnie wrote. “He’d always make me the most delicious pasta at lunch and we’d eat and schmooze and have a cigar before we went back to work. One day, he packed my cigar with marijuana without telling me.”

“I’m a fanatic about memorising my lines so I never touch the script once I arrive on a set, but when we got back after lunch, Danny said his line and I just stood there. 'Duh.' Before lunch, we had filmed this exact scene for the master shot, and we both had nailed our lines. Now, after lunch when we came back to cover our close-ups, in front of hundreds of people, I was speechless.

“Ivan Reitman reminded me of my line and asked the script supervisor to show me the script, and it was like I was seeing something for the first time. My brain had completely forgotten the scene I had no trouble with before lunch. Danny was laughing up a storm, and Ivan flipped the cameras to film Danny’s close-up so I could read my lines off the page and we wouldn’t waste any time.

“As we went on, it all slowly came back to me and I could join in the laughter and finish my scenes. I can’t complain because once on a movie I worked with the effects guys to put a small explosive in someone’s cigar. We were lucky this was on Ivan’s movie because if this ever happened on a Jim Cameron film, we would have been in real trouble.”

In the newsletter, Arnie also gave an update on Triplets, the long-gestating Twins sequel that will feature Eddie Murphy as Julius and Vincent’s long-lost sibling. “I absolutely love it!” he said of the script. “I am so excited about this project, and it sounds like Eddie Murphy and Danny DeVito are as fired up as I am, so after we go through some little notes, I hope we can get going.”

Meanwhile, Arnie has been doing a lot of TV work lately. Last month saw the debut of Superhero Kindergarten, the animated series — created by the late Stan Lee — where Arnie is the voice of a super-powered gym coach working undercover in a preschool.

On Wednesday (May 19), Netflix announced that they are teaming up with Arnie on his first-ever-scripted TV project, where he will star alongside Monica Barbaro in the as-yet-untitled spy adventure series from Nick Santora (Scorpion, Prison Break). </p>

Per the logline, the show centers on a father and a daughter who learn that they’ve been secretly working as CIA Operatives for years. They realise that their entire relationship has been a lie and that they truly don’t know one another at all. Forced to team up as partners, the Untitled Arnold Schwarzenegger Project tackles universal family dynamics set against an international backdrop of spies, fantastic action and humor.

Arnie, in a statement, said: "Fans from all over the world have been asking me for a wild ride like this for years, and now they're finally going to get it because of our great partners at Skydance and Netflix. I am beyond pumped to start work on the show with Nick and Monica and the whole team."

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Photo: TPG News/Click Photos