Linda Hamilton has come back to the franchise that started it all. Here’s an exclusive first look at a searing black-and-white image of Hamilton in action as Sarah Connor in Terminator: Dark Fate, the latest reboot of the classic James Cameron franchise. The actor once again plays Connor, a college student in the original 1984 film whose life was transformed when she was pursued by the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). But it’s the second film, set 11 years after the events of the first film, that cemented the role’s iconic status, with Hamilton undergoing a hardcore exercise regimen to turn Connor from an everyday woman into a fighting machine of her own accord. Three decades later, Hamilton still looks every bit the action hero.
Connor takes center stage in the new trailer for the latest film as well. She’s now an almost mythical figure who turns up amid chaos to save the world from a dangerous new class of Terminators. This time around, she’s helping Grace (Mackenzie Davis)—an android who, Connor notes, seems to be equal parts human and machine. Grace insists that she is human, which . . . guess we’ll see about that.
Dark Fate also revolves around a young girl, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), being pursued by a relentless new Terminator (played to cold effect by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actor Gabriel Luna). And, of course, Connor also loops in Schwarzenegger’s original Terminator, who gets a brief moment in the spotlight in the new trailer.
The film was directed by Tim Miller (Deadpool) and produced by Cameron. In a 2017 interview, Cameron spoke candidly about the way he convinced Hamilton, now 62, to return to the fold and give the series another go after she sat out sputtering reboot attempts like Terminator Salvation, Terminator Genisys, and the TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, starring Lena Headey in the titular role.
“I called her up, and I said: ‘Look, we could rest on our laurels. It’s ours to lose, in a sense. We created this thing several decades ago. But, here’s what can be really cool. You can come back and show everybody how it’s done,’” Cameron recalled. “Because in my mind, it hasn’t been done a whole lot since the way she did it back in ’91.”
The filmmaker was also determined to showcase an older female lead in an action movie, and Hamilton seemed like the perfect star to handle that responsibility. “There are certainly plenty of fifty, sixty, seventysomething guys out there that just keep cranking along doing action movies and killing bad guys left and right. But there isn’t an example of that for women, and I think there should be,” he said. We concur. Terminator: Dark Fate will hit theaters on November 1.
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