A Terminator actor has urged everyone to ‘not tell Arnold Schwarzenegger I said that’ after comparing him to Reacher actor Alan Ritchson.
While Arnie, 76, is perhaps the most renowned action hero of all time, having appeared in a never-ending stream of high-octane thrillers ranging from Predators to last year’s Fubar, Robert Patrick has dared to claim Alan may have surpassed him.
Robert, who played the villain T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day and will portray another baddie in Reacher, chimed in on Arnold and Alan’s physiques, revealing that the latter, 41, was ‘bigger’.
‘Don’t tell Arnold I said that,’ he joked. ‘But right now, Alan in his present state and age, he’s bigger.’
Robert continued to Cinema Blend: ‘Alan encompasses a lot of similarities in the size of his massiveness of muscle gain. And he moves very well. And Arnold moves very well. They’re both athletic guys.’
In 2022, Alan exposed the terrible rule he follows in the Amazon Prime series, based on Lee Child’s best-selling novel series about an itinerant former military commander who becomes entangled in horrible murders.
In an interview with Men’s Journal, the Aquaman star revealed that he aims to maintain a lean physique and typically weighs 205 pounds. I wanted to bulk up for this, so I gained 30 pounds, bringing my total weight to 235 pounds. I was working it out five days a week for the eight months we had to prepare.
In addition to working out to gain weight, the actor claimed that his nutrition was the most crucial aspect of his preparation, joking that he had ‘a conveyer belt of food’.
Alan added: ‘It’s a full-time job to get 4,500 calories and 300 grams of protein in your body. I was lucky that I had the help.’
Similarly, in 2019, Arnold, then 72, disclosed his extreme physical plan filming The Terminator: Dark Fate, which put twenty-somethings to shame.
He said: ‘I train every day. I ride bikes every day, I ski, I still do a lot of sports, so for me it’s a little more normal that I’ll come in and do my action movies that I’m ready and in shape,’
Last October, he told The Times about the secrets of his workouts: ‘Calves are basically the biceps of the legs.’
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Making training calves a priority, he continued: ‘It used to be the last thing I did before I left the gym, now it was the first thing I did when I came in. A thousand pounds on the calf raise machine for dozens of reps. Seven days a week.’
Arnie previously also said he felt like ‘damaged goods’ after having heart surgery shortly before turning 50.
‘This is the first time I felt kind of like vulnerable, where all of a sudden the doctor says, “You know, you shouldn’t lift that heavy anymore or just pay attention when you breathe when you exercise. Exhale, don’t keep the air pressed inside, because that is too much stress on the valves in the heart. All of a sudden there was dialogue like that.’
In 2023, he told Howard Stern that he wasn’t ‘upset’ about having to think in that way when exercising because he couldn’t change it.
‘I just feel like as those challenges come my way, I take them on. Because it’s the only choice I have.’
He added that now at 76 years old, he’s full of energy and enthusiasm and is as ‘enthusiastic and excited’ as he was when he was 30 years old.
Reacher is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.