How Arnold Schwarzenegger Made James Cameron Sick for 6 Hours When They Met for ‘Terminator’

The Terminator franchise started with the union of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and filmmaker James Cameron. Although their first meeting had gone well enough, it was despite Schwarzenegger making Cameron sick for hours.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was eyed to play Kyle Reese in ‘The Terminator’

The Terminator would’ve looked completely different if Cameron didn’t have his way. Mike Medavoy, who was the chairman of one of the studios behind the film, envisioned Schwarzenegger as the resistance fighter Kyle Reese. Meanwhile, the studio considered O.J. Simpson for the Terminator.

Cameron nixed the idea of Simpson joining the franchise. But whereas he might not have shown resistance to the idea of Schwarzenegger being Kyle, the actor was drawn to a different character on the page.

“I got fixated on the Terminator,” Schwarzenegger once said in an interview with Men’s Health.

His passion for the Terminator came through during a meeting with Cameron. Cameron eventually became convinced that Kyle was the wrong role for his new star.

“He’s a machine,” Schwarzenegger said. “So everything has to be matter-of-fact. I told Jim that. I said there should be no joy, no gratification, no kind of victory lap of any sort. Just the mission, complete. I go through these points. Jim, afterward, says to me, ‘F***, you analyze it better than the way I have written it. Why don’t you play the Terminator?'”

Arnold Schwarzenegger made James Cameron sick for 6 hours when they met

Schwarzenegger was hesitant about being the Terminator partially due to the character’s lack of dialogue. Eventually, however, he decided to play the part. But before that, in the beginning Cameron didn’t like the idea of Schwarzenegger being in the movie at all.

“Initially, I didn’t really want Arnold. I’ll never forget telling my roommate, ‘I’ve got to go have lunch with Conan and pick a fight with him,'” he said in a 2009 interview with Games Radar.

The plan was to rile Schwarzenegger up so Cameron could at least say he tried to recruit the star. But Schwarzenegger charmed the Titanic director into hiring him even though the actor made Cameron sick.

“That was my agenda: to get in an argument and come back and say he was an a**hole. But he was so charming and so into the script. Even though he made me smoke a cigar that made me sick for six hours,” he said.

He later asserted that the casting worked well despite Schwarzenegger initially not fitting his vision for the Terminator.

“Casting him shouldn’t have worked. The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit and there’s no way you wouldn’t spot a Terminator in a crowd if it looked like Arnold,” he continued. “But that’s the beauty of movies. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger had a problem with the ‘Terminator 2’ script

Cameron and Schwarzenegger would later reunite to film the hugely successful Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But since Schwarzenegger had his reservations about the script, it took some convincing to bring him back on board.

“I could tell there was something bugging him, right? We were pals at this point. Post-Terminator, we rode motorcycles together,” Cameron once told The Ringer about Schwarzenegger. “And he said, ‘Jim, I have a big problem with the script.’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ And he said, ‘I don’t kill anybody.’ I said, ‘I know, right? They’ll never see that coming. Nobody will guess it.’ He said, ‘I know, but one thing is surprise. Another thing is I don’t kill anybody and I’m the Terminator.'”

But Cameron was able to convince Schwarzenegger that the new plot twist would work. Schwarzenegger also agreed that if it worked, the movie would be huge. History later proved Schwarzenegger right.