It has been a magnificent career for Arnold Schwarzenegger. From bodybuilder to action movie star, from Planet Hollywood spokesperson to Governor of California, Schwarzenegger has accomplished more than most – and you can relive a lot of it using your Netflix subscription to watch Arnold on the streaming service. My point being, there’s no shortage of conversation starters one could bring up when meeting with the longtime Terminator. So when Heart of Stone star Gal Gadot met with Schwarzenegger due to his new position as Chief Action Officer of the Netflix streaming service, they didn’t speak about movies, or culture. She commended him on his recent trip to Auschwitz, in Poland.
It was in September of 2022 when Arnold Schwarzenegger journeyed to the site of the Nazi camps to meet with relatives of Holocaust survivors and spread his message of kindness and peace. While speaking at a synagogue following his trip to the former camps, Schwarzenegger was quoted by Forbes as saying:
This is a story that has to stay alive, this is a story that we have to tell over and over again. … I was the son of a man who fought in the Nazi war and was a soldier. Let’s fight prejudice together and let’s just terminate it once and for all.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sojourn must have moved Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress born into a Jewish family with roots in Poland, Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. She had shared this photo with the “Governator” on her social channels right before doing press for Heart of Stone (way before SAG went on strike against the AMPTP.
“It’s Turbo Time” - Arnold & Me 💫 @Schwarzenegger pic.twitter.com/l5aBQsGCwEJune 20, 2023
So I asked her what it was like to meet the Hollywood icon, and she told me:
It was great. He’s such a wonderful, warm, open man. I grew up watching his films. I still do, with my daughter. We just watched Twins the other night. We were actually talking about work and Israel, and Austria, and I was thanking him for going to Auschwitz, to the camp, last year to visit, and to talk about what happened in World War II. And how important it is to keep the… to remember what happened so it will never happen again to anybody. We were talking about that a lot.
Gal Gadot essentially helped to spread the words of awareness that Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to bring about through his visit to Auschwitz. The history of that region obviously is incredibly important to both actors, and I’m encouraged that they’d use their shared platforms to keep a focus on world atrocities, so that – as Gadot says – they never happen again.
We need the strike to come to a resolution so that both Gadot and Schwarzenegger can get back to acting. He has a second season of FUBAR that has been promised, and she keeps teasing a return to Wonder Woman, though we will see what James Gunn has to say about that in his reconfigured DC Universe. Time will tell.
