Entertainment journalist Margaret Gardiner interviewed two legends of the Terminator franchise, Arnold Schwarzenegger (T-800) and Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor), about the new Terminator movie, Terminator: Dark Fate and the informative chat yielded some rather interesting details…
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Interview transcribed by TheTerminatorFans.com
“Congratulations, I absolutely enjoyed this movie so much”
Margaret Gardiner
“Good.”
Linda Hamilton
“I wanted to turn uh, this little bit upside down, um, let me first ask you Arnold – you’re known as this big strong, hunky man and yet you show your softer side in this film; talking about drapery and helping with the groceries… could you just touch on that, are you good at decorating in real life?”
Margaret Gardiner
“Well, I definitely have that side to me, the artistic side and I think it has to do with when you… if you’re at all into horoscopes – I’m a Leo but I’m a Cancer rising and uh, so I paint, I’m very much into decorating and arranging, I love always, when we make a decision, to, let’s redecorate the house and let’s redecorate a certain room or something like that and I sometimes start collecting things like just in case we decorate a certain room – that I have all the stuff ready to go because I have a very clear vision of what things should look like and stuff like this. So definitely there’s this side of me, yes.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Interviewer to Linda Hamilton:
“You, of course, er, were one of our original action heroes for women at a time when women didn’t get that chance – so, are you aware of a certain degree of awe that women hold you in, and what was it like to do the action, uh again, to come back and do that?”
Margaret Gardiner
“Yes, well, I have been by a few people in my life – since I started playing Sarah Connor and the impact will show in someone’s face or in their words, um, so coming back… ? I actually was really afraid that people would be disappointed because that’s just… it’s just easy to assume that they’re going to say ‘Oh my god, she got OLD! She doesn’t look like Sarah Connor! Oh – ” You know, um, so I really felt like I would only, and could only, come back with the hope of showing something new and building on what I had already built on, and… we’ll see if it worked – I haven’t seen it yet.”
Linda Hamilton
“It worked.”
Margaret Gardiner
*Linda laughs
“Coming back to characters like this; what were the parts, the favourite parts, that you wanted to include again, uh, that was good to revisit for you?”
Margaret Gardiner
“I think that um, the whole behaviour of the Terminator, you know, when you play the machine part, I think it’s very cool, and uh, I think that people really like that and I know from the past Terminator movies that this is one of the things that people always commented on – that they really like, that they, themselves want to be like a machine, you know? Because so many people have sort of a tough time in life, so they wish that they could be like, for one day, just a machine and not have to face all the difficulties and all this and just be able to throw people around like I do in a movie and to, to take on the challenges as a machine and not with any emotions or anything like that. So I think that people find this very attractive.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Also the one-liners – are those the things you improvise?”
Margaret Gardiner
*Linda responds by silently shaking her head
“Uh, no, well sometimes you do but in a Jim Cameron movie you don’t, because er, he doesn’t leave you much space. You know, he just says, ‘don’t – I don’t make any changes to your acting, so you don’t make any changes to my script’. So there’s a very clear deal because I tried that one time on Terminator one, where I had a suggestion about something and he [Jim] says ‘look, I don’t correct your acting, don’t correct my writing’ type of a thing, so he’s very sensitive about that. Uh but in other movies, yes, you do. There were certain things, like for instance when I talk about the draperies and about the colours and the butterflies and the stripes… that all was improvised. There were certain things where I feel… “
Arnold Schwarznegger
“He created that.”
Linda Hamilton
“… where I feel like, okay, I think we can go a little… it would be funny to go a little bit almost, kind of feminine in that way, which will be funny for – to play totally the opposite of the killing machine.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Of what you’re expecting.”
Linda Hamilton
“Yeah.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger
“And that’s what’s so great, is to always do the unexpected, and I think that’s what made the difference between the first two films; is that Sarah Connor goes from this nothing waitress to this fierce warrior, and that’s great because you just um, turn your audience on their end, and they’re just all of a sudden – not seeing what they expected to see, and it’s that much more… um, drawing them in.”
Linda Hamilton
“It’s funny also but this movie, which I had to laugh about…” *Turns to Linda* “I don’t know if you kind of, caught on to that but I mean – Terminator doesn’t say much right? In the first movie I had like twenty-seven lines, end of story – in Terminator one and that’s why I didn’t want to take, originally, the part in the first place but in this movie I become a little bit more talkative because I’ve adapted some human characteristics, so much so that she [Linda] says ‘I hope that he shuts up now’. laughs She shut me up because I was talking too much apparently and that’s why it was very funny from the first movie – the way I didn’t say anything at all…
Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I try to shut him up.”
Linda Hamilton
“… to, as I say, to this movie where she says ‘I hope he shuts the fuck up’, you know, so it’s actually very funny.”
Arnold Schwarzeneger
Full interview below.
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