The Terminator franchise plays a significant role in why Arnold Schwarzenegger rose to astronomical stardom. The James Cameron directorial skyrocketed his fame and turned him into a household name. But interestingly, the actor initially didn’t like the movie’s casting. According to him, he didn’t even want to play the titular hero but a coincidence changed the whole story.
As said by the True Lies actor, he wanted to play the role of Kyle Reese in the 1984 science fiction flick. Even the makers had different plans as OJ Simpson, Tom Selleck, and Mel Gibson were the initial names they thought of. But a lunch between Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron made the director rethink his plans.
Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t supposed to lead The Terminator
The Terminator is one of the most renowned movie franchises of all time. The six films franchise didn’t work well after James Cameron left the director’s chair following the first two movies. But it cannot be denied that the franchise has a huge contribution to Schwarzenegger’s career. Despite all this, it sounds quite surprising that the Conan fame didn’t even want the role at the start.
The beans were spilled by the 75-year-old actor during an interview with Howard Stern. The actor made it very clear that it was nothing but pure coincidence.
Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed that he learned a lot from Yul Brynner’s role as an Android in the film Westworld. He was explaining to the director how the actor playing the titular role should be aware that they were portraying a machine. While he was busy demonstrating the aspects of the character to the Titanic mastermind, Cameron was intrigued by the actor’s knowledge about the role. Soon he questioned if the Predator fame will be willing to helm the role.
“This went on for like an hour because I saw the Yul Brynner character in “Westworld” where he played the machine and I was so amazed at his performance, so I kept talking about how [the Terminator] has to talk, and how he has to get up and how he has to tear his flesh out and how he has to operate on his eye, and you know, no pain, no feelings, and James Cameron looked at me at the end of the lunch, and he said, ‘So why don’t you play Terminator? I mean, you understand him so well, this character, that’s exactly what we need.’”
But despite having immense knowledge about the role, Arnold Schwarzenegger was still in no mood to helm the role. He wanted to play Kyle Reese who was eventually played by Michael Biehn in the movie. As per by the seven times Mr. Olympia title winner, he didn’t want to do a role only having 27 lines in the whole film. He wanted more room to shine and wanted to be the leading man. It was only when the director promised to make him heroic, the audience got to watch one of the iconic characters of all time.
Is Terminator a dead franchise now?
Despite releasing five more installments under the Terminator umbrella, the Arnold Schwarzenegger franchise wasn’t able to replicate the success of the first two movies. Even after the Terminator Genisys was a good addition among the sequels, the last project Terminator: Dark Fate turned out to be a box-office bomb. It raised various headlines stating that the franchise is dead. But James Cameron managed to keep the hopes on.
Although Cameron is lately busy with his widely planned Avatar series, last year he opened up about the Terminator franchise. He revealed in the SmartLess podcast that a discussion to reboot is still going on.
“If I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try to launch that franchise again, which is in discussion, but nothing has been decided, I would make it much more about the AI side of it than bad robots gone crazy.”
Looking at the Avatar: Way of the Water success, it is difficult to say if Cameron will get enough time to think about Terminator. But it will be interesting to find out if the franchise manages to stay alive after everything it went through.
The Terminator can be streamed on HBO Max.
Source: The Howard Stern Show
