Forty-five years into his acting career, Arnold Schwarzenegger is showing us a new side of himself with Maggie, his new indie film opening in limited release on May 8. The action icon and former politician makes a go at being a serious leading man in what is, zombie apocalypse setting aside, actually an emotional drama about a father and his dying child. Schwarzenegger plays Wade Vogel, a Midwestern man living in a near future in which the "necroambulist virus" has civilization on the brink of collapse. When Wade's teenage daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) gets bitten, he brings her home after making a promise he has no intention of keeping — that when she starts hungering for human flesh, he'll put her in quarantine.

What's refreshing about this choice isn't that Schwarzenegger wanted to do the role — the Austrian actor is no chameleon, but he's been consistent about pushing himself on screen. It's that it works so well. The larger-than-life star, who's soon to be reprising one of his most famous roles in Terminator Genisys, is still formidable as hell at 67, but he looks and feels more human-scaled. Wade is a man used to and still very capable of fighting his own battles, but there's nothing he can do for his daughter as she slowly transforms into something that could be dangerous to him and to those around them. "The story was interesting to me because it gave me a chance to play a more vulnerable character rather than a 'throw the grenade and blow everybody up' type of thing," Schwarzenegger said when BuzzFeed News spoke to the once Governator about other times in his screen career when he tried to show us something new.