Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't interested in playing the Terminator. He wanted to be a hero, like John Wayne—not a villain with barely any lines. And he said as much to director James Cameron when they met to discuss his potential casting in the now-iconic action film.
Schwarzenegger wrote about the meeting in his 2013 memoir, Total Recall. As the story goes, the Austrian Oak went into the lunch dead set against playing the killer robot—and yet he kept telling Cameron his thoughts on how the Terminator should be played. Cameron wanted Schwarzenegger to take the role, and after some convincing, he agreed.
In a new interview for the October cover of Men's Health, Schwarzenegger reflected on the career-making casting that almost didn't happen.
Originally, Schwarzenegger had his eye on playing the human resistance fighter Kyle Reese, but when he read the script for the movie—before his meeting with Cameron—"I got fixated on the Terminator," Schwarzenegger said.
At lunch, he remembers telling the director: "He's a machine. So everything has to be matter-of-fact. I told Jim that. I said there should be no joy, no gratification, no kind of victory lap of any sort. Just the mission, complete. I go through these points. Jim, afterward, says to me, 'Fuck, you analyze it better than the way I have written it. Why don't you play the Terminator?'"
He wasn't into it. ("I said, 'The Terminator only says 27 lines,'" Schwarzenegger recalled.) But eventually, he was persuaded to take the part—and the rest is cinematic history.
Schwarzenegger told Men's Health that audiences were strangely drawn to his character's absence of all feeling: "People really admired the character, because he was able to do things they all wanted to do," he said. "Everyone wants to wipe out a police station when they get mad at the police. We had a test screening. We showed it to 50 cops. They all applauded when I wiped out the police station—because it was not a human being doing it, it was the machine doing it."
Because age is nothing but a number for 72-year-old Arnie, he'll be back (see what we did there?) for Terminator: Dark Fate, which hits theaters Nov. 1.
