“Sarah Connor doesn’t thrash”: Linda Hamilton on her enduring Terminator character
Film Features Linda Hamilton
Linda Hamilton didn’t just achieve success with her role as Sarah Connor in the Terminator films. She became an international icon, an actor whose presence in Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day heralded her entry into the pantheon of action heroines, expanding and adding new shades to the representation of women in genre cinema. Over her long career, Hamilton has been in numerous other projects, including hit films and TV shows like Dante’s Peak and Beauty And The Beast—but this past year she returned to her most recognizable role, again portraying the tough robot-killer trying to save the future. We spoke with Hamilton during the recent campaign for the home video release of Terminator: Dark Fate, and the actor was her typically unguarded self, opening up about the endurance test of filming, how her feelings about Sarah Connor have changed over the years, and being one of the only people unafraid to say “no” to (ex-husband) James Cameron.
The A.V. Club: When you first agreed to come back to the Terminator franchise, what was the part of Sarah Connor’s arc you were most interested in exploring? What got you excited for the role again?
Linda Hamilton: The fact that it launches from a completely new place, story-wise. That she’s no longer John’s protector. The future has treated her badly, and she is just sort of an empty shell at this point with nothing but vengeance on her mind. And really empty because she doesn’t even love humanity. She was a woman standing alone, trying to kill the machines and not at all a fan of people. So to start there and to certainly do my work as an actress and explore and build on my greatest disappointments and sorrows in life, and how that makes me walk and how that makes me talk—to be able to do that level of work was really appealing. Launching a different story and the character in a new place.
AVC: There are a few interviews with you when Dark Fate came out in November where you talked about being the only one not scared to challenge James Cameron’s dialogue. Did you have to speak up and advocate for some of the elements of Sarah that you were most invested in?
LH: Very much at times. The script wasn’t really finished when we started, and it was kind of coming along as we went along. And we all found that very hard to work that way. I heard too many people say, “Well, that’s how they make movies these days.” [Laughs.] It’s like, you know what? I need a beginning and a middle and an end. Link those moments together one by one; I’ve got to know where I’m coming from. And I would get a scene that had just been sent the night before and go, “Well, I can’t be saying that if they’re going to move that piece to onto the train top, because my character hasn’t learned it yet!” You know what I mean? Like, “Let’s make this something that is solid so that the actors can then work that way… We can’t wait until September for the script to be finished.” So, yeah.
I think a little bit of the character spilled over into Linda Hamilton, too, because… I’m a breeze. I really just am simple about my work. I just do my best and try to make the director happy. I’m not results-oriented, but I’m very invested in Sarah Connor. And I just felt like, “That does not feel organic,” or, “No, she’s not going to let anybody help her down from the tailgate of the truck. Hands off, it’s Sarah Connor. Nuh-uh! Nope.”
AVC: So that was an actual instance?
LH: Oh yeah, it was. Just all kinds of little moments that add up to the character when you see it all together. That’s a very small example. There were versions of the scene where we first meet the Terminator—when we meet [Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character] Carl —where they tried to flip it so that the Terminator is the one holding me as opposed to the girls holding me back. And we tried forever to make that work, but there was no way to get free of it, because I was never going to slump in defeat in his arms. I just was like, “Sarah Connor would die trying to fight her way out of this machine’s arms. I am not going to slump in defeat, so let’s find some other way to do it.” And so forth and so on.
AVC: Is it satisfying to have input like that? It feels like this almost required you to put on a producing hat to a degree, helping shape and steer this character that you’ve been with for so long.
LH: Yes, to a degree. I have never really wanted to produce and be the one in charge. I don’t think it brings out the best in anybody. [Laughs]. Really, I just simplify. I’m like, do your work, and make the director happy. I made that decision 25 years ago. That’s my only job. I don’t get to say, “Well, it feels awkward to be walking uphill in the scene.” You know? I’m not that actor. But that said, I did feel my own weight, and my weight as a creative, strong, and talented woman or actor in terms of just going, “Wow. I’m saying no.” I never say no. I try to make it work. But here—I’m just like, “Wow, I can say this. I’m not saying that.” [Laughs]. It’s the first time and probably the last time I’ll ever have that on the film stage with me. Like, “Mmm, I’m not saying that.” So yeah, it felt good.
AVC: To what degree did that input extend to the stunt work? Because this was obviously a very physically demanding shoot.
LH: Yes. I hate to give up—even this day at age 62, 61 when I did it—I just can’t bear giving up a second [of screen time]. I am all over it. And now this film, there were just so many versions of me. We would do the scene on the freeway in Spain, and I felt like I had seamlessly achieved what we had rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed for 80 hours. And then they would have two more weeks of the stunt-doubles on the freeway. And I’m like [exasperated], “I already did everything! Why wouldn’t…” Like, “And her hair needs to be cut in the back! No, I don’t want that. Her hair isn’t the same.” Or, “Get that one to stop thrashing. Sarah Connor doesn’t thrash. Make it more controlled.” It was just really painful for me. The body-double in the first scene where John is killed, she was a bona fide actress and a very good body-double. But it’s like, “Fiercer! Don’t just let him hold you, bite his arm! No, bite his arm with the gun!” It was just like nobody can do Sarah Connor like I can. That’s all. So, I don’t want to give up one second of it.
AVC: It involves so much physical preparation as well. Did you enjoy the experience of having to re-enter that period of intense training, muscle-building, and everything that goes into crafting the physicality of such a tough character?
LH: Nope. I don’t enjoy it at all. How could I? It was a year of eating pretty tasteless food. No carbohydrates for a year. I had a village here: an amazing trainer, but also the nutritionist, the pilates instructor, the physical therapist, the chiropractor who kind of ameliorates the hard parts and kinked parts while we continued. I was literally working with somebody every day, and sometimes twice a day. So it’s not enjoyable, but it’s pretty great to go, “Wow, I’m starting to think of this as a flank, not a hip.” To remember that, and the feeling of strength in the body, and the ability to move, is really what we worked on. Not moving like an old woman, you know. So there’s great value in all of that, but probably not a way of life.
AVC: What were the things that surprised you most about doing the role again? What during filming was most unexpected?
LH: I was not prepared for the largesse of the stunt sequences and the action sequences. I mean, yes, I am a filmgoer and I understand that. But this film was ten times more demanding, in terms of action and the physicality. If you look back at Judgment Day, it’s basically just, yeah, I’m running, I beat up the security to get out of the mental institution, but there’s no real hand-to-hand. It’s just weapons. Here, for weeks, once we all got to location, and before we started shooting—it’s military training, stunt training, Spanish lessons, scuba lessons. When I read the script, I couldn’t even process some of the action. I’m like, “What? Huh?” I mean, it’s just so large.
It’s a very different world from the last few action pictures that I did. And pre-viz [previsualization]—it was the only thing that could save our lives—the sort of animated-visual version of what we’re trying to create. We would have to refer to it, because you’re in zero-gravity fighting, or you’re drowning and this other thing is happening. Thank God there was some visual help to figure out where we were, because you do little bits and pieces or this and that. It’s just really hard to envision because it was so complex and huge.
AVC: Speaking of the changes in the intervening years: Because you weren’t involved with the subsequent sequels after T2 until this one, did you avoid seeing them, or did curiosity lead you to check them out at some point?
LH: I saw the third one, and then I saw Salvation, but I did not see the one with Emilia Clarke [Genisys]. Because, of course, Sarah doesn’t need to know those stories. We’re treating it as a direct sequel to the last one that I was in, but I am very curious, and actually have always wished the franchise well, because I was a bit of the beginning of it, and you want your babies to go out and be successful in life. So I always had high—well, not high hopes, but good wishes—but didn’t really care for number three and four, so I skipped number five.
AVC: Is part of it also that number five is the only one where there’s actually a different Sarah Connor in there, with Emilia Clarke? Do you feel a twinge of possessiveness?
LH: A slight bit, which might contribute to my reluctance to see it. But, you know, I didn’t feel like I needed to keep watch over the character. I saw the first episode of Sarah Connor Chronicles. I love Lena Headey, and I think the worst thing in the world is to try to go and repeat someone’s performance or participate in the later version of some iconic performance. And I say iconic in—I’m putting quote marks there, because that’s the word that other people use about Sarah Connor. I don’t think of myself as iconic. But I do know that I did a stage version of Laura, which is a very famous movie with Gene Tierney, and that was iconic. And all that anybody ever wrote in the reviews were, “She’s no Gene Tierney.” So I understand how difficult it is to step into somebody else’s shoes, and they have a lot of leeway to do what they need to do.
AVC: Now that there’s been some time since Dark Fate came out, has your perspective on the film changed since its release?
LH: I’ve only seen the film once, because I just find it awful to watch myself. And the only reason I watched it was because I love [director] Tim Miller, and I love my actors, and I just thought I owed it to Tim to see what we had done. Because we would yell that back all the time while we were shooting. He goes, “Linda,”—over the bullhorn—“You’re going to see this movie?” I’m like, “I’m not! You’re not the boss of me! You’re the boss of me right now!” [Laughs.] It was always a will-she-or-won’t-she thing. I want to support the people I love. They are my dream team, truly. Mackenzie [Davis], Natalia [Reyes], and Tim. It was like Tim and his three muses, you know? And forged by fire, man. We put it all in everyday.
AVC: You’ve said one of the reasons you were hesitant to come back is because you’ve built a life that’s well outside all of the Hollywood trappings, and you didn’t want it infecting your life again the way it did after Terminator 2. Do you feel like you’ve succeeded more this time in keeping your high-profile day job apart from your everyday life?
LH: Uh-huh! Really great. I’m not sure how much of that is due to the fact that the public did not go out and see it. I mean, the box office really—I can’t say disappointing, because I don’t use subjective words—but the fact that it didn’t perform at a level as T2 did might impact the public’s interest, quite frankly in New Orleans, where I live. I was just worried about, like, paparazzi up on the levee, the increased visibility and scrutiny and all of that. But in New Orleans, it ain’t about what you do or what you have, it’s about who you are, and that has remained true.
AVC: The Terminator is a pretty iconic franchise to be a part of. Are you looking forward to stepping out of the spotlight again, or would you be interested if some other massive cinematic universe like Marvel or Star Wars or whoever reached out to you?
LH: I’m not really big on the huge franchises. I’d much rather do work that is risky and different and that nobody sees. I mean, I’ll do theatre for seven bucks a night for the rest of my career and be very happy. You know, I just want to do the acting part. I’m just a really lazy movie star, and I can’t hold myself up to or live up to or stand up for those that can’t live up to—It’s like, nah, I’m out. I love acting, so that’s what has to remain very clear. I hope I always get to do it.
42 Comments
Nice interview. Thanks for doing it.
Wait James Cameron produced and wrote this did he not? How the hell was it in this state during filming?
The studios don’t like “finished drafts” anymore. They like production to remain fluid in case they want to change something for whatever reason. Same thing happened to the sequel Star Wars trilogy. I feel like Harry Potter was the last multi film series we will get with actual tailored and finished scripts. I do not count Marvel. That is a different beast entirely.
Marvel is a great example of the switch from, for lack of a better term, waterfall to agile development of movies.
That is actually a really good way to put it.
It seems like every fucking movie these days is, “wildly optimistic release date, casting, location scouting, stunt coordination, shooting schedule, and, if we have time, maybe write a script.”
It’s a big reason that so many of these big-budget movies fail on a basic narrative level. Shooting a movie is complicated enough as it is, you really shouldn’t be figuring out the narrative structure and character arcs during filming.
Rewrites have always been a thing though. From what I’ve heard Casablanca was pretty much made up on the fly. I suspect it’s more about “why” the rewrite is happening.
Cameron in particular has always been notorious for them. It’s why his actors usually hate him and he always goes overbudget, because everything keeps changing all the time.
That’s true, but that’s rewriting an already finished script in an attempt to fix what’s not working or make what is working better is a lot different than writing the script as they go.
These days it seems like they start shooting with nothing more than an outline and pre-vis on the big action set-pieces and come up with all the dialogue, narrative connecting tissue, and character arcs on the fly.
Considering some stuff that happened in the past few years: namely, the Westworld folks openly admitting they’ve changed entire story beats because Reddit figured out a twist and Suicide Squad getting edited into a movie that wasn’t intended in the first place, I imagine a lot of that switch comes from massive amounts of focus testing and corporate insecurity.
yes well written post. it is like if there is enough cgi action and darkness all we need is shots of some famous actors so they look worried or scared and they will edit a movie together.
There is the whole mess of if the movie doesn’t make 3x budget in the first 3 days it is now considered a failure.
I recently watched godzilla king of monsters and the meg and both scripts and plot summaries could have been written on one post it note.
I recently watched godzilla king of monsters and the meg and both scripts and plot summaries could have been written on one post it note.
Something that’s bizarre in this process is that, as scriptwriting time decreases, plots have paradoxically gotten more complicated. You ever notice how movies pretty regularly seem both overstuffed and underdeveloped? That’s a big reason why.
Take a look at classic action movies, like the first three Indiana Jones movies, or Die Hard, or Predator, or Aliens, or Robocop or, hell, the first two Terminator movies. These movies all have dead-simple plotlines with a straightforward conflict. John McClaine is a cop fighting thieves pretending to be terrorists in a skyscraper. Ellen Ripley and a bunch of marines go fight Aliens, things go badly. Killed cop becomes RoboCop, kicks ass. Indiana Jones searches for the Ark of the Covenant, fights Nazis. Indiana Jones searches for the Holy Grail, fights Nazis. Indiana Jones searches for the Shankara stones, fights offensive ethnic stereotypes.
Those straightforward conflicts allow for a lot of craft and character development so the movie feels unique. It gives characters down-time and space to develop relationships organically while gradually ratcheting up the tension and stakes. Sarah Connor has a chance to consider the Terminator as a surrogate father, John McClaine has little chats with Sgt. Powell, Indiana Jones alternately fights and flirts with Marion, Willie Scott, and Elsa and chats with his dad about his childhood.
They try to do this stuff in movies now, but because they’re married to having nine plot twists and 137 action set-pieces there just isn’t any room and the shooting schedule is already decided before they carve the overly-busy plot outline down to something clean and manageable. There’s a reason why Mad Max: Fury Road felt like such a throwback, it was simple and clean and allowed for all of that important stuff that most action movies these days don’t have time for.
wow well written. thanks!!!
“Her name is Catherine” … *strings swell* … “From the moment I saw her, she captured my heart …”(I still remember that intro after all these years…)Seeing as we’re unlikely to get a Random Roles interview with her (to be honest apart from Terminator(s) and a disaster movie with Pierce Brosnan don’t think I’ve seen her in any other films) would be nice if a “By the way” question about Beauty and the Beast was snuck in there somewhere. Does she ever meet up with Ron Perelman for brunch? What did she think of the recent version with Kristin Kreuk as Catherine?
Its been bizarre to see newer films in a franchise assume making their older heroes failures is a good way to sell tickets but hopefully with their Box Office failures it’s a trend that’s very much done.
That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? The last installment (of whatever) decades ago ended with triumph. There’s no movie in “yup, we still won” so something had to go terribly wrong in the interim. Or you end up with yet another soulless Die Hard movie (this time it’s his daughter! This time it’s is son! Next up it’ll be his favorite cousin!)
Yup, that’s a Last Action Hero reference.
It’s tricky for sure to come up with a compelling narrative after winning, but I think it’s possible and would make for a better story as these films that have chosen to effectively reset haven’t worked either.
Just a mere 5 seconds of the trailer for the most recent cash-grab Terminator movie was enough to put me off it… Sarah Connor was interesting when she had weaknesses and was struggling to understand her world. Now that she’s portrayed as some sort of bazooka-totting bad ass, which even does the cliched walk-away-with-your-back-turned-to-the-explosion shtick, they’ve destroyed the character.
This. She’s fucking amazing in T2, the end with her loading the shotgun one armed is up there with John McClane in Die Hard for sheer bruised, battered but still going badass characters. She’s not a character who’d ever fail at protecting John.
The circumstances don’t really leave her a lot of choice, I mean time travel’s a bitch.
I had the same reaction, especially to that explosion shtick you described. I have yet to watch this installment, but I hope the struggle and confusion she was displaying in T2 will still be in this one because it makes her more interesting. The trailers show her to be an automaton, whereas in T2 she struggles, she hesitates, she shows emotion even as she tries to be devoid of it in service of the cause. I guess I’ll find out once I rent it.
Her arc in T2 was really rediscovering her humanity. She’d already largely turned herself into a terminator in her mission to defend John to the exclusion of everything else (such as that great moment where John thinks she’s hugging him when she’s actually just checking him for injuries). It’s only when she can’t bring herself to commit cold-blooded murder that her humanity reasserts itself.
So it makes sense that she’d go through a similar arc this time around. Her only real link to her humanity is gone, so she’d go even further into the “terminator of terminators” emotionless machine of vengeance.
Sarah very much struggles in it. She has a little scene in this one that I honestly think is one of the best performances she’s ever done.
I just watched the clip above and wow is it ever not good. The blocking, the LINE SHOUTING, the storming off. It’s like they think Sarah Connor is a mindless barking bulldog.*no shade on bulldogs
If that’s what you got from the trailer, it’s on the trailer. In the movie it reads very differently – Sarah isn’t not scared because she’s just that badass, she’s not scared because she doesn’t care about anything anymore. Think good Clint Eastwood movie rather than Rambo.I honestly enjoyed the fuck out of this movie, Hamilton is fantastic in it and it deserved to do far better. It gets bogged down at times in the second half, but overall I think it’s a messy little gem that more than deserves a home media afterlife.
I agree.
I also willingly extend this to Laurie Strode and the Halloween “thing” they got happening.
I saw it, and her personality was still consistent, it seemed like she was doing the whole “I’m a bad ass action hero” thing, but it’s kind of a cover for a woman who just doesn’t know what to do with herself except this. She lost the only thing that made sense, and now she has to cling to that image in order to keep going. Don’t be mistaken, it is not a great (or even good) movie. It has some cool parts, Mackenzie Davis is excellent in it, and some of the stuff from Natalia Rayes was good, but it lacked a lot of the power the other films had.Still her performance was solid in my book.
She was great as Chuck’s mom agent Frost.
Chuck’s casting was just so consistently great. Everytime I recognized somebody, I’d mentally slap my forehead yelling “Of COURSE!”
That scene in T2 where she slides backward when she rounds the corner in the mental hospital is my favorite single movie scene.
My favorite movie scene is when MacGruber distracts the bad guys with a stick of celery up his butt! We’re both students of cinema!
Yeah that is a great scene and now I’m rewatching T2 today. Thanks.
Yup.This is a great moment, because it’s Sarah’s pivot back into family, back into relationship, paradoxically through this thing she fears so much. And it’s such an amazing beat to work into an action sequence.
Whatever his faults, James Cameron is a dramatist. He knows story is the character’s emotional journey, and he makes sure those journeys end and end satisfyingly.
I loved T2, but I do remember being fixated on Linda Hamilton’s bangs. They were in her eyes the whole movie and I just wanted to trim them. They would have driven me nuts!
The fact that they were still writing the script while shooting explains so very much. It doesn’t explain how the whole Carl subplot made it from page to film, but I don’t think anything or anybody can explain that. I actually fall on the side of “Dark Fate was pretty alright for what it was”, but I can’t deny that you could almost hear the writers sigh when they had to write a plot to string the action setpieces together. That’s why T2 was so good: It had time to breathe and worldbuild between the pew pews and ‘sploders. Take that long running time and use it to explain why Legion isn’t just a word-swap for Skynet. Explain how Rev-9s work and what makes them different than “A T-1000 duct taped to a T-888″. Talk more about the effects of augmentation. Make me CARE. I mean, I adore the franchise, and when John died my reaction was “Eh, okay.” (admittedly mostly because of the sins of past sequels, but still)This wasn’t meant to be a rant, but it’s so frustrating to think about. This movie seems like it killed the franchise for good, or at least for a very long time, and it came closer than any of the other sequels past 2 to being good. I think the constraints of a TV budget were the best thing to happen to Terminator, as it forced them to tell an actual story and be creative.
Agreed. They kept saying “Legion is nothing like Skynet!” but everything else they said about it made it sound exactly like Skynet. I wish we could have dove deeper into this augmentation thing and Legion itself. I wish they had a better reason for Carl than just “He got bored and started a family and they’re married but they’ve never had sex and she totally has no idea he’s a murder machine from the future even though it’s totally obvious.”. T2 is legitimately in my top 5 favorite movies, in part because they actually explained a lot of the timey wimey fuckery instead of hand-waving everything away.
Dark Fate is basically the T2 template all over again, which… you know, T2 is one of my favorite movies ever, but we already had the perfect version of it (…T2). What I would really like to have seen would be a version where we follow Carl and find out why a Terminator unit would develop a conscience. It ties into discussions about AI I’ve had where the basic point is that any mind sapient enough to be able to adapt to new situations on the fly and make judgment calls would also by necessity be able to question its core programming. Humans are creatures of instinct but we can identify those instincts and find ways to alter/suppress them; a Terminator unit would be able to do so also.It could even use some of the plot elements in this movie: we follow Sarah in the years after John’s death and watch her develop into this empty shell who lives only for revenge, and we follow Carl as he learns about compassion. And eventually they meet (because the time-altering shenanigans of T1 and T2 lead to sentient killer robots being developed by a different company). They could assert that technological development is always going to lead to genocidal AIs and time travel, and that this is going to be an unending cycle. You can’t stop AIs from eventually existing, so it would be better to teach them compassion instead of creating them as machines of war. Is it any surprise that an AI created to manage nuclear weapons decided to be warlike?
Hamilton did a short arc on Lost Girl that was sharp but also sweet as a meta moment of bringing one of the queen mothers of genre into that world just to cherish her work and her company.
I never watched her TV shows, but her best acting was under the direction of James Cameron. She wasn’t very good in Dark Fate.
I love how she (likely because she hasn’t been part of the machine for a while, and was brought into this in a bit of stunt casting) just has no time for modern movie making bullshit. Most of the stuff she talks about is why the movie had problems. Action scenes that are less about telling a story, than they are about setting up the next explosion, characterization that starts to break down as the plot moves forward, a plot that seems to be wandering in search of resolution or an arc. She had no qualms about calling it as she saw it, which I admire in modern Hollywood. Especially the bullshit idea that the action movie fitness lifestyle is in any way enjoyable.Fucking Carl the robot was dumb and I hated it. What would have been more interesting was if John Conner was still alive, but just didn’t matter. Like they won, his future didn’t happen, so now he’s just a guy who has to help the next “chosen one”. That would have more resonance than Carl. For all that, I mostly enjoyed watching it. The parts I liked were where the movie put in effort, and they were cool enough I didn’t mind the rest while watching the film.
The worst thing that ever happened to the Terminator franchise was Terminator 2. Because T2 just did everything and did it all so perfectly and even had the decency to actually resolve the franchise pretty definitively. Every entry…EVERY…SINGLE…ENTRY after T2 has had to haphazardly retcon T2 to increasingly desperate levels. Now who cares anymore? Who cares if John Connor dies and skynet is legion and Sarah is old and Arnie is old and bladdy bladdy blah. We used to have the safety net of “If James Cameron was in charge, he wouldn’t desecrate T2 for quick cash!” But now we have the knowledge that Cameron will happily dig up the corpse of his masterpiece for desperate cash. (This is less about the specific quality of dark fate and more about the futility of it needing to exist at all)
I thought this movie was just fine. It’s what I like to call a “popcorn movie” – fun to see in a theater with a big thing of popcorn and you enjoy it for what it is. And it was fun to see Linda and Arnold back again, and allowed to age. But they still could kick ass!