Slowly but surely. While Joseph Baena now has a tight bond with his dad, Arnold Schwarzenegger, that wasn’t always the case.
“My relationship with my dad, it took a little while for me and him to get really close and just [feel] like I can joke around with him and talk about anything,” the Los Angeles native, 24, said on the Tuesday, January 18, episode of the “Unwaxed” podcast. “Now it’s awesome. I’m so close to my dad, and we joke about everything.”
The realtor, who “grew up with” mom Mildred Baena, used to feel “nervous” that the 74-year-old Terminator star would “think bad of” him, explaining, “[I didn’t want him to] be like, ‘What the heck is this guy doing? He’s just partying all the time.’”
Baena exclusively told Us Weekly in November 2019 that he considers his dad to be a “huge inspiration” as he follows in his bodybuilding footsteps. “Constantly working on the body, working on your personality, the mind, everything is beneficial to you,” the actor said at the time. “I always want to better myself, so I think bodybuilding is a great way for me, personally, to better my physical health.”
Baena pointed out on Tuesday that while the Austria native has four other children with Maria Shriver — Katherine, 32, Christina, 30, Patrick, 28, and Christopher, 24 — Baena has “never had the Schwarzenegger name.”
He added, “I haven’t focus[ed] on changing it. I’m doing my own thing. I haven’t thought of it that much. I have a last name already. I’m already doing so much and succeeding and moving forward with my goals. That’s the last thing on my mind.”
Last month, Baena told E! that there were a “few different variables” in his decision to keep his last name.
“That’s just not my main priority at the moment, so I’m just focused on building myself up and building my career in acting and real estate and just focusing on that right now,” he told the outlet in December 2021. “I mean, my dad is a stallion. He’s a man’s man, I like to think, and I look up to him a lot. … So in a way, he’s influenced a lot of things: the path that I have taken with acting, with fitness and my physique and the many other things that I’m doing.”