Pictured: T-800 Driving In Future War…

So here is another picture from Terminator: Genisys.  Obviously it’s a T-800 driving a truck.  This is from the future war, a sequence shown early in the movie.  Although to go into more detail than that would probably ‘spoil’ the movie as it’s an integral narrative scene.

Here’s a closer look from an earlier storyboard.

Again, the T-800 appears to be different from the Stan Winston model, there are some variations.  Look at the arms.  The Terminators in the background there look like different models entirely.  Oh, and Jai Courtney has spoken about ‘moving on’ and ignoring Michael Biehn’s ‘Kyle Reese’.  I wonder if Biehn had accepted the cameo, would his words have been different?

To be honest … I don’t pay any attention, really, to how the role has been played before. I might watch [previous works] for a point of reference as far as the world or the style [and] genre of filmmaking, but I [have been] asked if I studied Michael Biehn’s performance [as Kyle Reese] in the first “Terminator” and I’d be crazy to go and do that. It’s not going to translate, and I wasn’t hired for the job to emulate someone else’s performance. It’s a standalone film and the character’s changed. The writing’s changed.

It’s not to say we abandoned all the setup. He’s still a soldier in John Connor’s army fighting the resistance, and he still has the task of saving Sarah Connor, but that’s virtually all that links the two. I just can’t see it being interesting as a performer nor it being interesting for the audience if I was trying to go in there and just steal things from someone who’d played that role already. I think there’s archetypal similarities you’ll get with doing a role like that, and you can pluck influence from other actors or other performances, but it certainly wasn’t a concern of mine to try and hit specific things.

If you’re talking about a biographical figure it’s different. We know certain things about certain people in history that define them. But I think there was enough in the writing and enough in the character brief that provided the actors in “Terminator” to kind of go with that, but then completely make it their own.