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Tom Arnold on 'True Lies' Most Explosive Scene

Tom Arnold has amassed over 150 movie and TV credits in his 30 year career, but it’s one of his first big screen roles that remains his most memorable. The 56-year-old actor got his big film break in the 1994 action flick True Lies, playing the comic sidekick to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s secret agent as they pursue the agent’s adventure-seeking wife (played by Jamie Lee Curtis). As Arnold told Yahoo Movies earlier this month, he owes it all to the film’s director, James Cameron.

“A lot of great actors had auditioned for my part,” Arnold said. In fact, when Cameron first told Fox executives that he’d decided on Arnold, the studio balked. “Don’t you read the tabloids?”, the studio asked Cameron, referring to Arnold’s very contentious (and very public) split with Roseanne Barr.

Cameron pushed back, certain that Arnold was his guy. And when Fox tried to nix the casting, Cameron threatened to take the film to Paramount, which had released the Terminator movies. That brought the studio to its senses, and meant Arnold got to stick around for the movie’s crazy production, which included a sequence requiring Cameron to blow up an actual bridge in Florida. “They blew it up, and I hear Cameron go, ‘Oh f— that. Rebuild the bridge,’” remembered Arnold, who got four days off while the crew reconstructed the bridge. True Lies went on to make $379 million worldwide.