I was the ‘Penis and Vagina’ movie quote kid from Kindergarten Cop

An interview with actor Miko Hughes for the 35th anniversary of the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy.

The 1990 film saw Schwarzenegger playing a police officer going undercover as a teacher to catch a killer he knows is the father of one of his students. For much of the movie, the investigation is just a loose framework so Arnold can have cute, funny scenes with kids, and the most memorable involves Joseph, who is best remembered as the child who, unprompted, stands up and tells Arnold, “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.” The Terminator star replies icily, “Thanks for the tip.”

That kid was played by child star Miko Hughes, who also had a recurring role in Full House as the Olsen twin’s school bully and played the kid who came back from the dead in the 1989 adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. Hughes is still acting (his IMDb lists six upcoming films, including a Night of the Living Dead remake and a Shudder original starring Frankie Muniz). He’s also on the con circuit meeting fans, but he took a little time for a phone call with me to talk about what he remembers from the set of Kindergarten Cop 35 years later, from his memories of hanging out with Schwarzenegger on set to how that iconic line got added to the script at the last minute.

Polygon: To get started, how old were you during the filming of Kindergarten Cop?

Miko Hughes: I think I was four. I was the youngest of all the kids on set.

Wow, I can’t remember anything from when I was four. Do you remember credits from that time?

Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. They're flashes. They're like picture memories.

Do you know how you got the job on Kindergarten Cop?

My parents, primarily my mom, would take me to auditions. Sometimes it'd just be like a cattle call. There'd be 20, 30 kids and we'd all just have to wait, go into the room, be in there less than five minutes, do whatever little line they want you to do and that's it. My parents would feed me the lines and then, as soon as I could read, that was probably the first stuff I was reading.

Do you have any recollection of meeting Arnold? What was your impression of him?

He was very kind. He was fun. He was nice, which I guess isn't too surprising. It'd be weird if he was a dick to all the kids in the classroom, that probably wouldn't make for a good work environment. He was fun to be around.

I knew he was a big action star because that's what my parents told me, but I had never really seen his movies. I knew the air around him — like, that's cool, it's a celebrity — but he didn't really intimidate me. He was just fun and I just wanted to play with him when he had time. He was busy, obviously, but he'd kind of play with us here and there, and we would hang off of his arms. He'd flex and we'd be hanging off. He was really, really generous. He bought every kid in the classroom a Sony walkman, which at the time was like an iPhone. That was the hottest tech out there, that funky old yellow cassette player. I used to rock out to the Power Rangers soundtrack and the Ninja Turtles soundtrack for years on that thing. It eventually broke. I also have a real silver whistle. He had the coach whistle, and the kids all got a whistle as well.

Do you remember your days on set as being fun?

You know, it's funny, that movie was this cultural thing. It was such a big movie, and it was such an amazing experience, and you would think, as an adult, I would want my memories to be of working with Arnold, working with [director] Ivan Reitman, traveling to Oregon, seeing the set and working on such a high-level production, but my memories are of being a really picky eater at lunch. Like, they got everyone pizza, but I didn't even like pizza. All I would eat was the pepperoni off the top. Then, the original Game Boy was new. That was the hot thing, and I was pretty good at it. I was the youngest and some of the older kids would bring me their Game Boys to pass certain levels on games because I could do it, and I was really proud of that. So, it's all little kid memories.

OK, the penis and vagina line, do you remember anything about it? Did you know what you were saying?

At the time, I probably didn't know what the word provocative meant, but I knew it was provocative and it made adults laugh. I knew it was kind of something I wasn't supposed to do, but I was given special permission in this case because it was funny.

How it came about, from what I understand, was they didn't have specific roles. Some character lines and situations were written into the script at the start of filming, but once they had the whole cast on the set, it wasn't necessarily improv, but they developed it during shooting and, I suppose it's either the director or producers came to my mom and said, "We have an idea. We want Miko to have this line. Are you okay with this?" My mom didn't answer immediately. She said, "Let me think about it, let me sleep on it" and took a day or two. She really wrestled with it. She said she wasn't sure, but she thought it will probably be one of the most memorable lines from the movie and she was right.