Many of Hollywood’s biggest casting moves take place after months of auditioning. Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s journey to becoming one of cinema’s most iconic action stars, however, began over a conversation at lunch.
On The Howard Stern Show, Schwarzenegger admitted that he never auditioned to be ‘The Terminator‘s T-800. He, in fact, walked into the meeting hoping to secure a different job: resistance fighter Kyle Reese. However, his deep understanding of the film’s villain ended up convincing director James Cameron that he had found the perfect Terminator.
A Character Arnold Understood Instantly
During the meeting, Schwarzenegger found himself passionately describing how the Terminator should behave on screen. He said that the cyborg should not walk or act like a human.
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“I said to Cameron, whoever is playing it, I just want you to be clear, he has to train himself to disassemble weapons and to put weapons together and to shoot and to load the weapons often blindfolded, totally blind, because a Terminator can never look down at his hand at what he’s doing because he’s a machine, he’s a robot”
He even pointed out things like the character’s walk and how it looks around, saying that viewers should never forget that they’re watching a machine instead of a human. After almost an hour of discussion, if Schwarzenegger understood the character so completely, why not play the Terminator himself?
Arnold Schwarzenegger Initially Rejected ‘The Terminator’
Schwarzenegger said his initial response to the offer was to turn it down. He was a leader of Conan the Barbarian and wanted to be in another movie with lots of dialogue. He counted the lines in the script and found that the Terminator didn’t say much, and that he felt it was a step backward for his acting career to take the role.
“I’m an actor, I counted the amount of lines this guy says, it’s 27 lines, then Conan I had 128 lines, so I’m not gonna go backwards, you can give it to someone else, I want to talk a lot, I want to perform, I want to be the leading man,” he shared. However, Cameron had other plans.
The director told Schwarzenegger that the Terminator would be the main attraction of the movie. He said the camera would be used to make the character appear larger than life, and therefore more memorable, even if he was not very talkative.
Cameron also joked that audiences wouldn’t judge Schwarzenegger for the character’s brutal actions because “you’re a machine.” The pitch was so convincing that it was a turning point in Schwarzenegger’s career and in the history of Hollywood.
‘The Terminator’ was released in 1984 and was a landmark that made Schwarzenegger a worldwide superstar and the start of a franchise that has shaped action movies for decades.
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