Exclusive: Arnold Schwarzenegger on Why He’s Not in the New ‘Expendables’ Movie

Though he appeared alongside fellow action stars Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren and Wesley Snipes in previous installments of the popular action-adventure franchise, he is sitting out No. 4, which is set to be released in theaters Sept. 22.

“It’s done and I’m not in it,” the star of Netflix’s FUBAR series tells Parade in the new cover story. He explains that he told his friend Stallone—who also wrote and directed the films—in advance of the production that he was bowing out. “I said, ‘You know what, we have done this and I’m out of it.’ And he really understood.”

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The original The Expendables, released in the summer of 2010, followed an elite group of mercenaries based in New Orleans who get deployed to the Gulf of Aden to save trapped hostages from Somali pirates. A surprise hit, it grossed $275 million at the domestic box office.

Schwarzenegger, deep in his second (and final) term as the governor of California during filming, took an uncredited cameo as Trench Mauser. “I did it as a favor to Sly,” he explains. “I shot it on a Saturday for two hours quickly in a church with Bruce Willis.” (The three stars, of course, go way back: They were all celebrity partners in the Planet Hollywood restaurant franchise in the 1990s.)

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After resuming his acting career out of office, he agreed to reprise the character in 2012’s The Expendables 2 and 2014’s The Expendables 3. “Sly said, ‘Oh, can you do Expendables 2?’ and I did that for a weekend,” Schwarzenegger recalls. “Then it was expanded for Expendables 3. And that was it.”

Still, he and Stallone do plan on flexing their muscles once more on the big screen: “We’re going to do something together one day.”

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