LOS ANGELES - In the opening episode of Fubar, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent character is labelled by his handler “the fastest 65-year-old white guy on the planet”.

But the American actor in real life is 75 and Fubar is his first television series: an eight-episode mix of rough-and-tumble action and comedy that is available on Netflix.

“This was an opportunity that was not available in the 1980s and 1990s when I was climbing up in my career after Conan The Barbarian and The Terminator,“ Schwarzenegger said of the 1982 and 1984 films.

The Hollywood star plays Luke Brunner, a CIA operative on the cusp of retirement called in to extract another agent from a dangerous assignment. That agent turns out to be Luke’s daughter Emma (Monica Barbaro) and hijinks ensue in their risky missions around the world to contain Boro (Gabriel Luna), a villain seeking weapons of mass destruction.

“He treats me like a child,” laments Emma, who shares many of her father’s qualities and butts heads with him in expletive-laden lines.

“It is chaos and that creates a lot of fun opportunities,” Schwarzenegger said.

“Some of them are very intense – it’s life and death – and some are them are laugh-out-loud and you say, ‘Oh my god this is really funny’,” he added.

American actress Barbaro calls it “quite a complicated relationship” as Emma fights to be anything but her dad, “but then realises the harder we fight to not be our parents, the more we become them”.

Against the serious work and dysfunctional family dynamics, an eclectic crew of CIA colleagues provides comic relief, cracking jokes on Emma’s “daddy issues”, Luke’s mispronunciations and his desire to win back the wife he lost to divorce years ago.

Comedian Fortune Feimster, who plays a character named Roo, disrupts the CIA mission meetings with what she calls “something ridiculous” to bring levity.

...