“I asked Arnold Schwarzenegger if he would do it, and he said ‘Only if you get the best band in the world’”: How Guns N’ Roses teamed up with a Hollywood megastar to make one of the most iconic videos of the 1990s

There are crossover moments in music history that feel inevitable in hindsight, and then there is Arnold Schwarzenegger stalking Guns N' Roses backstage and concluding they are a "waste of ammo." That is not a fever dream. That happened, and it remains one of the most purely brilliant things the 1990s produced.

How It Actually Came Together

The year was 1991. James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the most anticipated film on the planet. Guns N' Roses, still coasting on the enormous momentum of their 1987 debut Appetite For Destruction, were the most electric band alive. Producer Larry Kassanoff understood immediately that pairing the two made obvious commercial sense, but first he had to get Schwarzenegger on board.

"I asked him if he would do it," Kassanoff told SFX in 2017, "and he said 'Only if you get the best band in the world to do it.'" Schwarzenegger went away, thought about it, came back and named Guns N' Roses specifically. That condition set everything in motion.

Getting the band to agree required genuine effort. Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver invited GN'R over to their home for dinner, which by all accounts involved a significant quantity of tequila. "Duff and I actually went and hung out at his house," Slash told MTV in 1991. "He seemed to be into the whole thing. We had a lot of shots with Arnold." The band were also given an exclusive screening of the film alongside Cameron and Schwarzenegger himself. According to Arnold, Axl Rose turned to Cameron afterwards and said simply: "I'm in."

The Song, The Video, The Legacy

The track they landed on was "You Could Be Mine," a song GN'R had been sitting on since before Appetite For Destruction even came out. Originally titled "Cocaine Talking," it was built around a grinding sleazy riff with Axl's vocals pitched somewhere between a threat and a snarl. Bassist Duff McKagan had been clear about what it was actually saying as far back as 1988: "It's about how the shit really fucks up your head." Not a celebration, a warning.

The video was shot at New York venue the Ritz, with the band performing live while Schwarzenegger's Terminator tracked them through the crowd. Arnie himself was not even scheduled to appear; he was flying back from a Congressional trip when he reportedly decided he wanted in. His team made it happen. The result was a clip that nobody who watched MTV in that era has ever fully forgotten.

Schwarzenegger gave the entire band leather biker jackets from the film, complete with bullet holes. The single dropped on 25 June 1991, a week before T2 opened. The film became the highest-grossing movie of the year. "You Could Be Mine" peaked at number 29 on the US singles chart, which feels modest by comparison, but it served its real purpose: clearing the runway for the simultaneous release of Use Your Illusion I and II later that year.

For anyone who wants a reminder of what music and film culture looked like when they were genuinely colliding rather than just cross-promoting each other, this is the case study. Two people at the absolute top of their respective games, a dinner table, some tequila shots, and one of the [most memorable videos the 90s ever produced](/uprise/music/10-obscure-but-brilliant-90s-bands-who-deserved-to-be). Sometimes the formula just works.