Orion Pictures Agreed To Finance The Terminator Under One Condition
"The Terminator" is a perfect movie. /Film's own Jacob Hall has argued director James Cameron has never surpassed it. Cameron knows how to get his money's worth from Titanic-sized budgets and the filmmaking world is a better place when he gets to reach the peak of his ambitions. Still, "The Terminator" — a lean sci-fi slasher that's both exciting and foreboding — shows that Cameron could still spin gold with more modest tools.
Even if "The Terminator" isn't much of an actor's picture, it's well-cast, particularly Michael Biehn as haggard time traveler Kyle Reese and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular cyborg assassin. This film was a key step in Schwarzenegger's climb to being the biggest movie star in the world. Even so, it's something of a Hollywood legend how these two weren't the initial picks for these roles.
In particular, it's spread through the grapevine that O.J. Simpson was considered to star as the Terminator. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2014 for an oral history of "The Terminator," Cameron confirmed this was true, but it was distributor Orion Pictures who were pushing for Simpson, not him. However, it wasn't so much that they wanted Simpson specifically, Orion co-founder Mike Medavoy just felt the movie needed a star.
Choosing the Terminator
Cameron first envisioned Lance Henriksen playing the Terminator (in the final film, he plays LAPD Detective Hal Vukovich, and then the android Bishop in Cameron's next movie, "Aliens"). The idea was that Henriksen looked like a normal man and could camouflage himself among humans — he'd certainly attract less attention than bodybuilder Schwarzenegger. Plus, as Producer Gale Anne Hurd told EW, she and Cameron thought using unknown actors would keep the budget down. Medavoy, though, actually wanted to shill out the cash to get big names attached.
Medavoy's suggestion to Cameron and Herd was Schwarzenegger as Kyle Reese and Simpson as the Terminator. As he explained to EW: "At the time, O.J. Simpson had one of those commercials for Hertz where he jumped over a counter and ran to get a rental car. It was all of that athletic stuff, which I thought the Terminator should have."
Hurd and Cameron were nonplussed by both of these suggestions. Cameron's objection to Simpson was twofold. One, he thought a film about a menacing Black man chasing around a white woman would send a racist message (which, yeah, good call there). Second, he thought the part of the Terminator wouldn't fit with the then-public perception of Simpson as "This likable, goofy, kind of innocent guy."
"Mind you, this was before O.J. was actually a killer," Cameron darkly joked. "We might have reconsidered after he had killed his wife."*
*Simpson was infamously tried for the double murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in 1994-1995. He was pronounced not guilty but later found liable in a civil suit by the Goldman family.
Arnold as the Terminator
As for Schwarzenegger, he was coming off of 1982's "Conan The Barbarian." Medavoy approached him with the offer of playing Reese (per Schwarzenegger, Medavoy told him Simpson was playing the Terminator) and set up a meeting between him and Cameron.
Cameron said he went into his first meeting with Schwarzenegger resistant, but to his surprise, the two hit it off. However, he concluded that Schwarzenegger would be better as the Terminator, not Reese. That was the character in the script who caught Schwarzenegger's attention: "I could visualize very clearly what the Terminator should look like. And so when I met Cameron to talk about Kyle Reese, I gave him all these points: This is what you should do with the Terminator, this is how the Terminator should act."
Cameron sensed that enthusiasm and also felt that Schwarzenegger looked the part of a human-machine (he'd trained his body like one, after all): "I was studying him at the restaurant, just watching the light from the window on his face and thinking, 'Holy crap, what a face! Forget the Reese thing. Arnold would make a hell of a Terminator.'"
Schwarzenegger was uncertain, being concerned about the Terminator's small amount of dialogue and what playing a villain could do to his career. Cameron convinced him that audiences would see the Terminator as cool, not evil. Since "Terminator 2" was able to turn Arnold's T-800 into a hero, he was right on the money.
"When [Schwarzenegger] committed that was enough to get us financed," Hurd said. Medavoy got half of what he'd wanted and that was enough to fill his one condition. And with the benefit of hindsight, Arnold's public image has definitely aged better than O.J.'s.