FUBAR Star Fabiana Udenio spent some quality time with loved ones this year, and posted the highlights on her social media. Udenio, who plays Tally Brunner on the show, shared a post full of beautiful moments with her family, including a picture of herself posing on the beach in a hot pink bikini. “Grateful to be able to spend some #beachtime with the #family 🥰 and get a little #respite from the #romanheat in beautiful #sabaudia,” she captioned the post. Here’s how Udenio feels about her role on FUBAR, and what it was like kissing Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Udenio is a dancer and gave Schwarzenegger some good advice about doing yoga and stretching before he lifts weights. “Yoga is a wonderful form of exercise that provides benefits that walking and strength training do not provide,” say the experts at the Mayo Clinic. “In Eastern cultures, yoga is not seen as exercise, but rather ‘a moving meditation.’ In the Western world, many people know power yoga or vinyasa yoga, which are classified as exercise.”
Udenio is 58, and was proud to represent passion on screen for older people. “I feel so lucky to be on the receiving end of some of Arnold’s rarely seen vulnerable moments,” she says. “I mean, this guy pours his heart out to get her back … And there are some really truthful, though vulnerable moments that he has with her. And listening to those, it really touch[ed] a chord in my romantic soul. And he made it very, very easy for me to show all the colors or the struggle that she has between these two guys. What was important to me is to show that passion [it] doesn’t have a predetermined age, you know, you can be any age and have that passion. And of course, any kiss you’re going to have on screen, you want it to be the kiss of the year.”
Udenio is a talented dancer, which offers health benefits both physically and mentally. According to a UCLA health study, dancing is very beneficial for mental health. “The number of participants who reported a therapeutic benefit was really large,” says Prabha Siddarth, PhD, a research statistician at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA . “That was the most surprising thing to me – the percentage of participants who were so benefited by this. It is free flow, it’s free moving. It invites reflection. It’s more meditative rather than physical. Because it is self-led, it makes it easier to let go. You’re not following rules or instructions.”
Udenio loved working with Schwarzenegger, and says it was a wonderful experience all round. “He’s a leader who’s a true leader in every way,” she says. “He can get the crew, the cast everybody inspired. He can focus and rehearse and be on. But then quickly, just not taking himself so seriously, make everybody laugh. And he’s genuinely curious about people when he has the time to ask questions, and they’re always great questions. [He] just made me feel comfortable in every way.”
Udenio found herself expanding her skill set while filming FUBAR thanks to Schwarzenegger’s love for improvisation. “One of the one of the things he does when he works is that he likes to improvise, which I didn’t expect,” she says. “I remember once he really started improvising, and I was kind of like trying to get it back on to the script … because I wasn’t expecting it. And then he kept improvising. So I go, ‘Okay, let’s go for it,’ you know? So we improvised this whole thing that it never made it into the final [edit]. But what it did is gave us colors and different exploring [of] the characters.”