Patrick Schwarzenegger has spent the past eight hours on-set in the Hollywood Hills, conducting multiple photo and video shoots, but his day isn’t over yet. He has a “hard out” to get across town in time to attend an acting class. Yes, acting class.
“I’ve been in theater school for the last 10-plus years,” the 31-year-old actor tells PEOPLE. “I take classes every week. For me, it’s about continuously finding ways to learn and grow.”
His years of hard work paid off when he landed his biggest role yet, on season 3 of HBO’s The White Lotus, premiering Feb. 16, a show he and his family have long gathered to watch on weekends together. “Working on a project like this is so cool—to get to learn from some of the best that do it is just a dream come true.”
His Hollywood Roots
For Schwarzenegger, acting was something he “always” knew he wanted to do. Growing up in Los Angeles as the son of legendary action star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, 77, and journalist and Kennedy scion Maria Shriver, 69, alongside his siblings Katherine, 35, Christina, 33, and Christopher, 27, visiting movie sets was not an unusual after-school activity.
“Going to set with my dad, that’s where my first love for acting came from,” Patrick recalls. “He would always pull me out of school early. I would get to go to Universal Studios—I’d watch him go in as Dad, come out as Mr. Freeze. I would sit there all day and just be fascinated with everything about film.”
Patrick, who participated in school plays and landed his first professional role in The Benchwarmers at age 10, was all in, telling his parents (who separated in 2011) he didn’t want to attend college so he could pursue his dream. It landed flat with his father. “My dad was like, ‘No, you’re not. You’re going to school, and you can study acting, but you can also get a degree in business,’ ” he recalls.
On a Roll
While Patrick was a student at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business with a minor in Cinematic Arts, his career started to take off. He booked a 2012 film, Stuck in Love, followed by roles in Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups 2 and the Amy Poehler-directed film Moxie!
“Working with Adam Sandler was amazing,” Patrick recalls. Watching the comedian act alongside stars like Kevin James and Chris Rock on Grown Ups 2, “I was like, ‘This is what I want my life to be.’ He had all his best friends that were in the cast doing roles, and then they’d say, ‘Cut,’ and then he’d go to his trailer, and they’d have a cigar and they’d play basketball. His friends would be directing, his other friends would be producing. I was like, ‘This is the dream.’ ”
In 2015 he expanded into television with Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens and The Boys spinoff Gen V, played Tim Tebow in American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez and most notably, acted alongside Colin Firth in The Staircase. During it all he still earned his college degree in 2016.
“The Staircase was probably the most challenging [role] because that was the first time that I got to really step into a very serious TV series and sink my teeth into a character,” says Patrick.
In between gigs he also dabbled in modeling, appearing in campaigns for Calvin Klein, Tom Ford and most recently Tommy Hilfiger with his fiancée, Abby Champion, 27. But he’s quick to clarify: “I would not say I’m a model. I’m far from it. I don’t enjoy it.”
“I get very uncomfortable on a photo shoot,” he admits. “I guess because you’re being yourself, but on an acting job, you’re playing some other character. You’re putting yourself into someone else’s shoes, and it’s a performance.”
His Forever Love
Champion, on the other hand, is a “supermodel,” Patrick gushes. “When we first met, there was obviously an attraction, physical attraction, and I thought she was the most beautiful girl that I had seen and was interested in hanging out and going out on dates. I was 21, she was 18. So you’re very different people and humans when you’re that age versus now I’m 31, she’s 27.”
But Patrick says he knew she was the one when he saw “how much she values family and how similar our core values are. . . . Over the course of the years, I just continuously fell in love with her more and more, with the kind of human that she was becoming and that the relationship was becoming.”
He says “one of the best things” of their decade-long relationship has been growing together in their personal and professional lives: “It’s been kind of fun to climb that journey as one.”
“Now to see her, when I walk down the street, on every billboard of Chanel or Celine or Victoria’s Secret . . . it’s just such a great thing to watch how much she’s grown and how determined she is and how hardworking she is and how she has such a vision for her life,” he says.
The Dream Role
As the White Lotus premiere nears, Patrick says it’s “surreal” stepping into HBO’s hit anthology series about vacationers who find trouble in paradise, not just because of its popularity—but because his family had long predicted it was his future.
“Every time we would watch the show . . . my mom was always like, ‘Why haven’t you auditioned for this? Why didn’t you go out for this?’ And my sister’s like, ‘You need to call your agents right now. This is ridiculous that you’re not in on the show, that you didn’t even audition,’ ” he recalls.
Still, when the email to audition for season 3 popped into his inbox, Patrick was “ecstatic” but stayed quiet. “I didn’t tell anybody because I was like, ‘Whatever, everyone’s going to go out for this show. I have such a sliver of a chance to get a call back,’ ” he says.
Even on a ski trip with his family, he didn’t reveal that he had to skip the slopes for a chemistry read. He simply stayed back—and mum—until he’d booked the role. And when he got the call, “I started crying, and it was the greatest day in history for me,” he says.
At this point Patrick couldn’t keep the good news in any longer.
“Obviously I’m going to tell my fiancée because we got engaged the week before, and I was like, ‘Sorry, I’m leaving for seven months [to film].’ So that was perfect timing,” he says with a laugh. “Then I went and had lunch with my whole family the week later, and I told them, and my mom started bursting out crying. Then my sister started crying, and then I started crying, and then Abby started. It was like a domino effect of mayhem and tears.”
Stepping into Saxon
Filming took Patrick to Thailand alongside costars Walton Goggins, Leslie Bibb, Parker Posey and Carrie Coon. “It felt like a summer camp mixed with work,” he says. “It was great, a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
His White Lotus character, Saxon (whom he describes as a “complete flirt” and “alpha male”), is part of the wealthy Ratliff family, which includes actors Jason Isaacs, Posey, Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola.
“We hung out as a family so much that Mike [White] came to us three weeks in, and he was like, ‘You guys can chill out with the family thing,’ ” he says of the show’s creator, writer and director.
As for whether he feels pressure to uphold the series’ award-winning legacy, Patrick says it’s a mixed bag. “You feel some pressure [because] the first two seasons were so great,” he says, but he puts his trust in White. “One of the biggest blessings is that he’s the writer, he’s the showrunner, he’s the director, he’s the creator—so he’s very specific [about] what he wants. When you weren’t doing what he wanted, he’d walk over and jokingly say, ‘What the f— was that? Redo it,’ from behind the camera,” he laughs. “You just have to trust that he knows what he’s doing because he does. I mean, it’s worked!”
Ready for the Ride
When the show airs, Patrick says, he’ll “for sure” host weekly watch parties with his family and friends—though he won’t stick around for every scene. “There’ll be a few episodes that I’ll be nervous to watch with everybody,” he admits. “The show gets spicy. There will be moments when I will probably take a bathroom break.”
But he’ll still be on the edge of his seat like the rest of the show’s fans. “I purposefully and strategically did not read all of the parts of the script,” he says. “I read all the stuff I’m part of, but there’s a lot of stuff in The White Lotus and throughout the story that your character doesn’t necessarily interact with. . . . So a lot of the time I tried not to learn too much about those so that I could watch it as a fan.”
As for what’s next, Patrick hopes to take on more dramatic roles, while keeping in mind everything he’s learned from his father. “My dad is all about hard work, determination, work ethic,” he says. “That’s probably what’s kept me working each and every day at getting better.”
He also credits his mother, who “sacrificed a lot with her career to take care of us kids,” with having the biggest impact on his life: “If you were to ask my dad, he would say it’s 95 percent my mom, 5 percent him.”
For now Patrick’s buckling up to go where his splashy new role takes him: “It’s just really exciting for me to see what’s to come of this.”
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