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Arnold Schwarzenegger has an estimated net worth of about $400 million, according to Men’s Health. That’s a helluva lot of money, but, in order to get there, Arnold took a couple gambles to avoid being typecast as only an action star who has always been the ripped badass in movies — which, if we’re being honest, is what he’s best-known for by nearly all of us anyway.
That said, the actor has starred in a number of different genres of movies, with things like Kindergarten Cop and the cult classic flick Twins being two that fall under the comedy category. And, when it came to filming the latter, Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to make sure that he could break the perception that he could only be successful in badass roles like The Terminator, Predator, and The Running Man, among others, which is why he actually refused to take a salary in order to land the part in Twins alongside Danny DeVito.
Per Business Insider, here’s how Arnold described what he said way back when to get the part in Twins.
“They were like, ‘No, we know we are going to make money with you if you do action movies,'” he told Business Insider. So Schwarzenegger decided to take a drastic step.
“Literally for ‘Twins’ I took no salary — I just wanted to give it a shot,” he said, talking about the classic comedy in which he and Danny DeVito play twins separated at birth who reunite as adults, both living very different lives. “And it just happened to be my first movie to make $100 million domestic. So they realized that it works, Schwarzenegger can cross over.”
This is incredible, and serves as a lesson that, while taking risks isn’t easy, it can pay off in the end. The real kicker of the whole thing is that, according to the Business Insider piece, Twins made $111.9 million domestically — which in today’s ticket sales would be $250.6 million — becoming the first film that Arnold Schwarzenegger surpassed the triple-digits in a movie at the box office. It allowed Schwarzenegger to expand his talents and show his versatility as an actor, ultimately leading to different parts and, in the end, giving him more opportunities in Hollywood.