2023-07-29 03:30:00
Find out who the producers’ first choice came close to stealing the iconic role of the deadly cyborg T-800 from Arnold Schwarzenegger, changing the course of the franchise forever.
Originally, the Terminator franchise was all regarding defying fate. Sure, humanity may have a bleak future of being hunted by skin-suited robot skeletons, but with a little ingenuity, that dark fate can be avoided. As Sarah (Linda Hamilton) and John Connor (Edward Furlong) like to remind us in Terminator 2: Judgment Day: “The future is not set. There is no destiny but the one we create for ourselves.”
However, the one machine from which humanity can never escape is the movie industry. And instead of breaking the cycle of fate, the success of the first Terminator in 1984 and Terminator 2 in 1991 led to a successful franchise that includes titles like Terminator Salvation and Terminator: Genesis. In fact, the phrase “I’ll be back” began to apply to both the franchise and the killing machine made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was not the first choice of the producers of ‘Terminator’
There is a frequent rumor that the role of the villain T-800 in Terminator was offered to a famous name before it was offered to Schwarzenegger, but whether there is any truth to that rumor has been questioned. James Cameron’s sci-fi action flick launched the actor and bodybuilder to stardom. Today, as the defining role of his career, it’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Schwarzenegger playing the Terminator. But sure enough, the role was almost played by a much more controversial figure.
If a nosy studio executive had had his way, the lethal cyborg character would have been played by OJ Simpson, the former football player who was charged with double murder in a 1994 criminal trial once morest his ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. In an appearance on Chris Wallace’s HBO Max talk show Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace (via Variety), the fellow Titanic and Avatar director clarified just how close Simpson came to landing the role of the T-800:
“Pretty soon, a high-ranking person at one of the two studios that financed that movie had a brilliant idea and they called me up and said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ I said, ‘Well, no, I’m not.’ He said, ‘Are you sitting down? Because I’ve got it: Simpsons for Terminator! I said, ‘Actually, I think that’s a bad idea.’ And there the discussion ended. That idea didn’t get anywhere,” said the also screenwriter of Rambo 2 and Battle Angel: The Last Warrior.
In another interview with the Los Angeles Times, Cameron named Mike Medavoy (the prestigious producer of The Sinister Island, Black Swan and Zodiac) as the Orion Pictures executive who introduced OJ Simpson, but reiterated that the suggestion was “immediately rejected.” The Terminator would have marked Simpson’s first major role in a movie. Instead, he ended up getting his big acting break with the comedic role of Detective Nordberg in The Naked Gun movies, a drastically different type of character than the T-800. .
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