Eric Roberts: No Arnold Schwarzenegger in ‘The Expendables’

One of the great online mysteries is who's behind official The Expendables blog? Let's backtrack for a quick moment. The Expendables is Sylvester Stallone's action movie orgy about a group of mercenaries hired to take down a Noriega-style drug lord. The cast reads like a steroid dealer's dream: Sly Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, and Eric Roberts. The official production blog is an eerily sparse Wordpress page, mysteriously titled Ethelmae's blog. The entries are sporadic but not infrequent, and usually feature stills from set and musings on the film's supposed awesomeness. Based on a sentence like "part of my job is to make sure no one takes photos on set other than the unit photographer," the writer probably stands on the third or fourth run on the Ladder of Importance (there are 18 rungs). They are not a crucial element, but privy enough to be trusted. So when "Ethelmae" hints that Arnold Schwarzenegger will have a cameo, is he/she to be trusted? According to Eric Roberts, no.

Last month, Ethel teased that “Arnold and Sly met on Saturday,” and when commenters deduced that the Governator was making a guest appearance (he is also rumored on the film’s iMDB page), Ethelmae shot back with this acid-tongued post:

I am not going to approve anymore comments about Arnold and whether or not he is playing himself ... I thought that had played itself out but apparently not so if that’s what you want to rant about please—with all due respect—do it elsewhere ...

Schwarzenegger is the obvious odd man out from the laundry list of acting brutes, but Eric Roberts—who plays a rogue CIA agent in cahoots with the main villains—insists that it’s lies, all lies. Says the actor: “Lies, lies, lies. I think he’s got a little more to think about these days than that.” Either Eric Roberts single-handedly wiped out all of Ethelmae’s credibility as an Expendables production blogger, or he was lying to me. I prefer the former.