Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Blunt Words for Anyone Who Believes in Heaven3 min read

Nobody’s Coming Back

Howard Stern asked the question like a dare. What happens when we die, Governor? Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t blink. “Nothing,” he said. “You’re six feet under. Anyone that tells you something else is a fucking liar.” That answer, delivered years ago on Stern’s show, resurfaced this week in an Interview magazine piece built around a conversation between Schwarzenegger and his old Twins co-star Danny DeVito.

DeVito had asked about the future — the water crisis, what’s ahead for all of us. The conversation drifted, the way conversations between old friends do, toward something larger. Death. What remains. What doesn’t.

The One Thing He Won’t Pretend

He’s not a nihilist. DeVito pushed back, and Schwarzenegger acknowledged the limits of what anyone can know. “We don’t know what happens with the soul and all this spiritual stuff that I’m not an expert in,” he said. But he held firm on one point: the body. The physical self that ages in the mirror, shakes hands, laughs across a dinner table — that version is gone. No return.

“When people talk about, ‘I will see them again in heaven,’ it sounds so good, but the reality is that we won’t see each other again after we’re gone. That’s the sad part.”

“Except in some fantasy,” he added. He said it without cruelty. That’s what makes it land.