Arnold Schwarzenegger will play an older looking T-800 alongside a younger looking model that’s eventually “reprogrammed.”
When it comes to action franchises, you’d be hard-pressed to find another quite as iconic as The Terminator films. It’d be no great stretch, in turn, to say that a big chunk of its popularity is owed to Arnold Schwarzenegger. The actor behind the titular Terminator itself, he’s starred in three of the four existing films and will be returning for the series’ 2015 reboot Terminator: Genesis.
As potentially exciting as his participation could be however, it’s also raised a lot of questions concerning how the film will deal with Schwarzenegger’s advancing age. At 66, he’ll be nearly thirty years older than he was when he starred as the villain of the original film. It’s an issue that the actor, speaking about the reboot recently, took time to address.
“It will be challenging because it will be a new director, and it will be a really action packed movie,” said Schwarzenegger. “And sometimes it does get more difficult when you’re 66 years old and doing this kind of action, versus when you’re in your 30s or in your 40s.” That said, Genesis will apparently be taking steps to integrate his age into its story. “The way that the character is written, it’s a machine underneath,” he explained. “It’s this metal skeleton. But above that is human flesh. And the Terminator’s flesh ages, just like any other human being’s flesh. Maybe not as fast. But it definitely ages.”
The film, in turn, will apparently also feature a second “younger T-800” that will eventually be reprogrammed. “What that model does later on when it gets reprogrammed, and who gets ahold of him… [there] will be all kinds of interesting twists in the movie.” Terminator 2, of course, featured Schwarzenegger in the role of a reprogrammed T-800 fighting on the side of humanity. Whether or not this younger T-800 will wind up doing something similar is something we’ll be interested to see.
Source: MTV
