You’ve seen Arnold Schwarzenegger as a sword-wielding warrior, a cyborg assassin and now, a CIA operative in FUBAR. But have you ever wondered what he’d look like as a puppet? Now you can in the action-comedy series, which is now streaming on Netflix.

Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix

Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix

Schwarzenegger plays Luke Brunner, a secret agent who finds out his daughter Emma (Monica Barbaro) is also in the CIA. The father and daughter duo must go undercover together to take down a dangerous arms dealer, but it’s not necessarily a happy family reunion. Emma feels betrayed by her dad’s secret profession, and Luke doesn’t agree with his daughter’s life choices. To better understand each other, their therapist suggests they speak to each other via puppets. “Since the only thing you both want to hear right now is the sound of your own voices, we’re willing to try this again. But you’re going to speak with each other’s voices,” Dr. Pfeffer (Scott Thompson) suggests.

As Emma says, “Those are like Sesame Street–quality Muppets.” How does one even begin to make a FUBAR puppet? Taku Dazai, chief creative officer of Walter Klassen FX, shares with Tudum how his team brought Schwarzenegger and Barbaro’s puppets to life.

Courtesy of Walter Klassen FX

1. Study the subject’s face.

Walter Klassen FX has been making film and television props for more than three decades, including everything from animatronics to robots. When it came to the FUBAR puppets, Dazai and his team were up for the task. “We got pictures of Arnold and Monica. You’re really simplifying their faces,” Dazai says. “In a lot of ways, that’s the tricky part because you’re trying to omit all the fine details of what the face is like to try to get a very overall look.”

Courtesy of Walter Klassen FX

2. Assemble the puppet.

After selecting which facial features to highlight, Dazai’s team sculpted the puppets and went to work on the details. “[Arnold’s] a bit more tan, so we dyed the fabrics slightly different colors to try to match it up,” he says. The key to making Schwarzenegger’s puppet look like him was fine-tuning the actor’s distinct facial hair. “We basically hand-punched and hand-glued all the stubble,” Dazai adds. To bring out the puppet’s eyebrows, the team decided to use simple buttons for the eyes.

For Barbaro’s puppet, they focused on giving her bigger eyes. “We just picked a wig that was her color, and then with the eyes and eyebrows, try to match it up,” Dazai shares. Once the puppets were assembled, the team bought children’s clothing, which included a leather jacket for Barbaro and a blue button-up for Schwarzenegger, and tailored them to fit the talking props. 

Courtesy of Walter Klassen FX

3. Practice your best puppet voice.

“In a lot of ways, it’s like we could make the greatest puppets, but it’s the actors, writers and directors bringing it all to life,” says Dazai. In Episode 4, Luke and Emma must talk as the other person’s puppet — which took Barbaro some practice to nail down Schwarzenegger’s distinct Austrian accent. “Monica took the Arnold puppet home to practice. There was lots of joking with them in between scenes,” Nicole Johnson, FUBAR’s property master, tells Tudum. She reveals that the rest of the cast also had fun talking to the puppets on set, especially Fortune Feimster, who plays Ruth “Roo” Russell. “She loved to do the voices and play with them the most.”

So, where are the puppets now? “We had packed the puppets away in a storage trailer for safekeeping,” Johnson says. If the puppets ever went missing, Luke Brunner might have to come out of retirement to go on yet another undercover mission to rescue them. (Schwarzenegger’s puppet did make a surprise appearance on the FUBAR red carpet in Los Angeles.)

You can watch the puppets in action and stream FUBAR on Netflix.