'Ben is verrry big, you're right,' Arnold immediately quips in that inimitable accent.Ahh, that's the old Arnie we all recognise: cigar-chomping, butt-squeezing, nipple-tweaking, loving-every-moment-of-it Arnold from a small town in Austria who still can't quite believe he became Hollywood's biggest movie star. But in a split second, the new Schwarzenegger has erased the smile on the world's most famous lantern-jawed face.
Schwarzenegger, Hollywood's most goal-oriented star, knows that a man with serious political ambitions, on the cusp of declaring he wants to be governor of California, doesn't make jokes to journalists about the size of his Big Ben. Allegations of past sexual impropriety may be his political Achilles heel. He also knows he can't afford to alienate the powerful Christian conservatives in his Republican party with breezy, Hollywood attitudes to sex.
After years of teasing about his political ambitions, Schwarzenegger has finally started pumping his political muscles. He hasn't yet declared that he wants to be governor of California - not quite - but he's been nodding and winking about it so much that he must be dizzy. The closest he has yet come is saying: 'If the state needs me, and there's no one I think is better, then I will run.' The party line is that he won't give it serious consideration until after the release of Terminator 3.
So instead we have the new model Arnie. This is the Arnie who is beginning his self-disciplined drive for political office much as he began the self-disciplined drive to become Mr Universe three decades ago, and to become Hollywood's top star after that. This is Schwarzenegger rewired, reconfigured, buttoned down, politically attuned, wary. Political Arnie is a a lot less fun than movie Arnie, prone to talking about public service, after-school programmes and his recent meetings in Washington with the George W Bush aide Karl Rove.
New Arnie is sitting here today at a hastily erected trestle table in a strangely empty room on a distant Warner Bros backlot in Burbank, talking about Terminator 3. His skin looks Beverly Hills smoothed, although he's now quite lined around the eyes. His hair, which seemed to be greying in recent years, now appears a more, er, robust shade of brown. If it weren't for the jutting jaw, the gap-toothed smile, the thick accent, and arms the size of the Panama Canal, he could be just about any other dull California politician.
Thankfully, new model Arnie hasn't completely effaced the old. I peek under the table and see he's sporting shoes of such fabulously ornate, colourful and no doubt expensive leather that they would not look out of place on the feet of a fashionista. He admits he's a 'shoe queen'. And each exquisitely manicured hand has a ring on it so florid and vast and weighty that someone who had not been pumping iron for 40 years could not possibly carry it. On his left hand, his massive wedding ring, a dark-blue star sapphire encased in gold. On his right, a huge silver and turquoise ring given to him by the Navajos when he was running the president's Council on Physical Fitness during the first Bush administration.
There's still something truly remarkable about the journey that Schwarzenegger has taken these past three decades. The once scrawny son of an Austrian village cop, with an unpronounceable name and an incomprehensible accent, willed himself to become the world's biggest movie star, married into the Kennedy clan, and now stands a damn good chance of becoming the governor of California, the world's fifth-largest economy. His story is the American dream: who better embodies the enduring reach of that powerful myth? No wonder he believes in bootstrap politics. No wonder he's a Republican. 'I hate losers,' he recently told a group of school children. And he does. He really does.
But these are tricky times for him, his movie and political fortunes awkwardly intertwined. Terminator 3 is his most important film in years, and not just because, as a Hollywood commodity, he dearly needs a box-office hit. For his political career, he needs to look like a winner again. In the past few years he has been written off more times than he has killed people in his films, 275 people by some counts. His most recent action movies - End of Days, The 6th Day, and Collateral Damage - have seemed like tired retreads, the uninspired efforts of a star who has reverted to type because that's where the money is. Still, what money! Despite the invariable critical drubbings, the always financially astute Schwarzenegger has been regularly banking $20m pay cheques.
Looking back now, it's clear that his film career peaked a decade ago, with Terminator 2. Right after that, he came to Earth with a deafening thud in the ill-conceived Last Action Hero (1993). Although True Lies, released the following year, was a big hit, he was never able again to force his career beyond his very obvious limitations as an actor. His efforts to branch out into comedy fizzled with films like Jingle All the Way. But he professes not to care what people say about him and he shrugs off critics who say he's past it.
'They've been writing that for 20 years - it's nothing new,' he says. 'I remember when Bill Clinton was elected, there was a big story which said, 'Okay, Schwarzenegger with his Republican movies with the action and the violence, all of this is gone now,' and then True Lies came out and it was the fourth biggest box office of the year. I'm used to all that - it doesn't make any difference. I don't take it seriously.'
He may seem like a throwback, but think about Dolph Lundgren or Jean-Claude Van Damme or the other musclebound action stars of that era. What's happened to them? Who cares? Schwarzenegger has outlasted them all. Even Sylvester Stallone. How? It's no secret. Iron will and focus. That's what is most compelling about Schwarzenegger: he has always been so nakedly, unashamedly ambitious. More than 20 years ago, in the book American Dreams: Lost and Found, he laid out the homespun philosophy that propelled him from his lederhosen childhood. 'I believe very strongly in the philosophy of staying hungry,' he said. 'If you have a dream and it becomes a reality, don't stay satisfied too long. Make up a new dream and hunt after that one.'
'I always say I am very fortunate,' he says. 'Originally, as a kid, my vision was to be like Steve Reeves or Reg Park; they won Mr Universe and then did Hercules movies. So when I saw that as a kid I said, 'That is exactly how I am going to get to America,' because I always wanted to get to America. 'I am going to win the world championships and then I'm going to make Hercules movies.'' And that's exactly what he did.
