New Photos of Sarah Connor in TERMINATOR: DARK FATE and Linda Hamilton Offers New Details About Her Character
Thanks to Entertainment Weekly, we have a couple new photos to share with you from Terminator: Dark Fate and they both feature Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor. It’s pretty crazy and awesome to see her back in this iconic role after 28 years! I honestly never thought that I’d see her back in this badass role, but here she is!
When talking about why it took her so long to return to the role, because opportunities have presented themselves in the past, she explained why this project was the right one for her:
“There is a real gift in that so much time has passed, and that gives me so much more to explore with the character. Sarah Connor is the same person but I wanted to see how the difference in events have changed her and shaped her and send her forward. There was meat there. I didn’t want to just recycle the same idea. It’s a woman who has a different mission, a different story, so I wanted to see what we could do with that.”
That’s great to hear. That’s exactly what this franchise needed, a fresh new story that isn’t more of what we’ve already seen. Of course, one could argue from what we’ve seen in the trailer there certainly are similarities to the previous film. Miller went on to explain why it was necessary to bring Hamilton back as Sarah Connor:
“When we started, we just didn’t know if she would do it. Jim [Cameron] was very honest about, ‘Look, I’ll ask her but I don’t know what she’s going to say.’ But he did and she was interested. Like a nervous deer, we had to creep up on her and convince her one step at a time to do it.”
Hamilton went on to explain that it took her weeks to decide if this was something that she wanted to do. But, she felt that there was something here and something new for her to say as this character, so she jumped on board and the fans couldn’t be happier! When asked if she assumed she was done playing this character, she said:
“It was many, many years of just being sure that it was done, that I was done. I kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, if I’m in one now it’s like the geriatrics era.’ [Laughs] Which is actually kind of true. I never saw this coming, which made it that much more interesting.”
When talking about what it was like to play the character again after all these years, the actress said:
“It’s not like riding a bike, I’ll tell you that. [Laughs] Of course, one assumes if you put in the same hard work, you get the same results, so I went straight back into training really hard and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, you need hormones to put muscle on!’ So just starting with the basic cosmetics of the character and all of the things that I had to sort of include in my new reality as Sarah Connor. But, really, it’s about building her backstory and figuring out where she’s been and who she is today. You have a character but so many things have impacted her in the last 30 years that it was like starting over, and yet, there is an echo of the younger Sarah Connor in everything that I had to create. But no, I worked damn hard. I spent a year-plus training really hard and working on her walk and exploring her deep sorrows and just so many elements, and more so, because there is a path there. By the time we started, I felt ready, but a year-plus before that, I was pretty overwhelmed with a sense of obligation and duty and love for the character, just really trying to make sure that we honored the past and created something new for the future.
As for where the story picks up with Sarah when the movie starts, Hamilton offered the following details:
“She’s a woman without a country. Her original mission has changed due to circumstances and she really doesn’t have a team anymore, she just has a thirst for vengeance, so that makes her very alone. She’s still a wildcard, but a wildcard without a real true mission is a lot more unpredictable. Basically very hard for her to find her humanity, so once again we get to take a journey on that level, to have some deep things that need to be rediscovered for her survival.”
Well, I certainly like the interesting direction they are taking her character. This is great and I’m excited to see how her story arc is going to play out over the course of the movie. When talking about what makes this movie different than the others, Director Tim Miller said:
“I honestly believe this would be the best version of the movie after the second one. This will be more clear when you see the movie, but the first two movies really deal with time as a loop, what’s happening is the same thing that happened before and everybody is fighting to ensure that happens again. And Jim had this lucky break that he only broke that rule at the end of Terminator 2 when Sarah destroys Cyberdyne, it’s the first thing that happened that hadn’t happened before, and so it was going to change the future — but no one knew how. And I don’t think the movies that came after it really explored that in a clean way like I believe we are, with true consequences, and it makes perfect sense for Sarah to be the one to face those consequences since they were her choices to begin with.”
We’ll learn more about the movie at Comic-Con later this week. Terminator: Dark Fate opens in theaters on November 1st.