The Atlantic

Arnold Schwarzenegger Plays Hero One More Time

The former governor calls in to <em>The Ticket </em>from his house in California to discuss the coronavirus response.
Source: David J. Hogen / Getty / The Atlantic

What, you haven’t been weathering self-quarantine by feeding carrots to your mini-horse and mini-donkey or smoking cigars in your hot tub?

Arnold Schwarzenegger—bodybuilding champion, actor, California governor, and now the star of PSAs urging people to stay home—is keeping busy doing just that. It’s one way to pass the time between working out a new partnership with TikTok to transform his decades-old afterschool program into a meals provider for children out of school and donating $1 million to buy masks for nurses and doctors who need them.

He doesn’t have much choice. He’s still Arnold Schwarzenegger, he still looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger (well, with reading glasses and a beard), and he certainly still sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But he’s also a 72-year-old man who had emergency heart surgery in 2018, and who loves to ride his bicycle around but has been keeping clear of crowds for weeks.

He knows thatand too. (, he says, is very entertaining, but “ is really exactly what is going on right now.”) He also just watched . That one is from 1936, a song-and-dance adaptation of with Myrna Loy and William Powell. It was a nice change of pace.

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