Why Linda Hamilton is back from Hollywood exile
Almost 30 years after she last played Sarah Connor in the Terminator films, actor Linda Hamilton, now aged 63, is returning to the screen in the iconic role that made her a star.
Stellar
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James Cameron had to leave three messages before Linda Hamilton finally returned his calls. The acclaimed director of Titanic and Avatar isn’t accustomed to that kind of response from an actor, even if she is also his ex-wife.
But a lot of water had passed under the bridge since they first worked together on 1984’s groundbreaking sci-fi film The Terminator, which launched their then-fledgling showbiz careers into the stratosphere.
During a break from her appearance at a fan convention in San Diego, the woman who played one of the most influential action heroines in film explains to Stellar it wasn’t personal.
“My friends call it Hamil-time,” she says. “I’m fully engaged in whatever I’m doing, and I will call you back when I am good and ready.”
Hamilton was married to fellow actor Bruce Abbott when she landed the role of the Terminator’s target, Sarah Connor, a 19-year-old waitress whose unborn son would one day save the planet.
By the time she returned for the 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Hamilton was divorced, a single mum to son Dalton and had physically transformed her body — the new Sarah Connor, now fierce and sinewy, became a touchstone for a generation of young women.
Cameron was also in the midst of a divorce from fellow director Kathryn Bigelow; soon enough, he and Hamilton became one of Hollywood’s golden couples.
They married in 1997, the same year Titanic released. But beyond the red carpets, their relationship was floundering.
They divorced two years later, but 20 years on they have what Hamilton calls “an amicable relationship. It is what it needs to be to raise our daughter [Josephine] successfully; two parents engaged in the same task with love. So we really worked, well, it was mostly me” — she laughs unselfconsciously — “to create a lot of goodwill. You have to make the decision, for years, every time you speak. That’s the hard thing about life. Forgiveness isn’t just a one-day deal.”
When her ex-husband told her he wanted her to bring Sarah Connor to life again, and explained that is why he was calling, she had significant reservations. It took her six weeks to mull over the decision.
Hamilton had spent years distancing herself from the character who had defined her. “I cut my hair, changed the colour, wore dresses. I did everything I could not to be Sarah Connor.” Plus, her relationship with fame had become ambivalent.
“I just felt like such an outsider to the way celebrity works: the inflated egos and boobs and lips. I went through a period of sheer belligerence about how empty all of that is. I really wanted to take a step back.”
She left LA years ago and moved into a 250-year-old farmhouse in Virginia, where she could be close to her dying parents.
It was where she chopped her own firewood to keep warm, but also admits that life could be “lonely and isolating”. When her stepfather passed away, she relocated on a whim to New Orleans, where she remains.
“I was hungry for something more authentic; to be surrounded by all kinds of people living different lives and having different kinds of struggles. I landed in the perfect place.”
So as she considered reviving Sarah Connor, says Hamilton, she had to decide if she was ready for a new rush of global attention.
“I don’t want people’s eyes to change now that they saw me kick butt in a new movie, you know? And I don’t want people hiding up on the levee trying to take a picture of me. I don’t want to think like that at all because I haven’t had to do so for quite some time.”
Fans have long focused on Connor’s extraordinary physical transformation in the early ’90s, but at the time she was also in the midst of a mental battle; by mid-decade, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression.
Today, at 63, she describes the period between ages 20 and 40 as her “lost years”.
Playing Connor requires her to go to dark places, but Hamilton says that was not a major factor in her initial reluctance to revisit the role. She just felt she’d taken the character through a complete arc — from innocent to warrior — in the first two films. “I felt like I had done it, and I kind of wanted to retire a champ.”
There have been other Terminator films since T2, with Connor played by Game Of Thrones actors Emilia Clarke and Lena Headey.
Of her decision to return for this new film, a standalone sequel to T2, Hamilton says, “The fact that there were 27 unknown years I got to fill in was kind of intoxicating. There is so much possibility. Where has she been? Who is she now? The character might be the same, but time changes us all.”
There was a brief flirtation with the idea Connor might have let herself go. “I wanted to have the same sort of shock value [as there was between the first two films]. I was like, what if she is fat? The total antihero.”
Eventually, Hamilton decided that if the character was still occasionally killing Terminators, as she is in Dark Fate, then she’s still a soldier. So she trained in the desert with Green Berets and took supplements and bioidentical hormones to build muscle.
“Of course, I assumed that if you put in the same amount of work, you got the same result, but that doesn’t happen at my age,” she says.
“So I was like, ‘Oh my god! This is so not working!’ Then you wake up one day and you realise it doesn’t matter how I look. It’s what I have inside, and it’s so much more than what I had 27 years ago. That was a liberation for me.”
And it’s fitting that three decades on, Connor is supported in her struggle against the machines by two equally strong female characters.
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Although Edward Furlong reprises his role as Connor’s son John, it’s Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) who is now the target for the modified liquid metal Terminator.
“She’s the new future of the franchise, the new hope for the future,” says Hamilton. A human/cyborg played by Blade Runner 2049’s Mackenzie Davis, meanwhile, is sent from the future to protect her.
“I don’t think it was intentional, but the end result is pretty powerful,” she says of the trio at the film’s centre. “Man, oh man... we turned into such a team. I love those women like I have never loved co-stars in my life.”
Still, Hamilton says filming Dark Fate taxed her on every front. “I swear I had an existential crisis, just going, ‘What am I doing? Why did I come back? Am I good enough?’ All those things that make the experience so deeply rich and human, the self-doubt and all of it.”
It helped that she was once more working with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who she had not spoken to since his 2003 inauguration as governor of California.
“I didn’t know how much I missed him until I saw him again,” she says. “I felt such great affection — maybe because he’s a little bit humbled, a little bit older. But whatever I saw in his eyes, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I love you. And I’ve missed you.’ And that is pretty much cement from here on.”
Now the film’s release is imminent, Hamilton tells Stellar she’s more excited than ever.
“It was the most terrible and the most wonderful thing that I have ever participated in, and those are the things that really add up to a good life. Don’t you think?”
Terminator: Dark Fate is in cinemas from Thursday, October 31.