Arnold Schwarzenegger Was Worried About Doing Fight Scenes With a Woman in ‘Terminator 3’
Arnold Schwarzenegger has been involved in plenty of fight scenes during his time as an action star. But he didn’t have much experience taking on women in his movies. This made working with his Terminator 3 co-star more difficult than he thought it would’ve been.
How Arnold Schwarzenegger handled doing fight scenes with his female co-star in ‘Terminator 3’
Terminator 3 saw Schwarzenegger return as the killing machine programmed to defend humanity instead of destroying it. Similarly to T2 Judgment Day, Terminator 3 would have Schwarzenegger protecting future savior John Conner from another cybernetic assassin. But unlike the second feature, Schwarzenegger’s sparring partner would be a woman.
Actor Kristanna Loken would play the relentless T-X in the 2003 sci-fi feature. She wasn’t too known at the time, having featured mostly on television shows like Law & Order and Boy Meets World. But Loken felt not being that popular of an actor at the time actually helped her in the role.
“I believe those that made the film should have a relatively unknown actress in this particular role because it makes the machine figure in the film more believable, says Loken once said according to the Terminator Files.
But Loken also presented a unique challenge for Schwarzenegger, who didn’t normally tangle with women in his action movies.
“What was challenging about doing it with a woman were the fight scenes,” Schwarzenegger once said according to Black Film. “I had no training of how you grab a woman, how you throw her against a wall, how hard can you really pick her up and throw her. How hard can you hit her? I had to rely on Kristanna to tell me that you can go harder, you can grab me rougher, you can imagine a guy standing in front of you.”
Getting his fight scenes right with Loken took the actor a considerable amount of time.
“It took five or six takes to get up to that level of rough handling her because I felt uncomfortable with it. She was a great team player. She trained well with the stunt coordinators that she could handle it and she didn’t mind taking a few bruises and pains and aches here and there. She just went for it,” he added.
How Arnold Schwarzenegger got into shape for ‘Terminator 3’
Schwarzenegger’s physique in Terminator 3 didn’t look too much unlike his body in the prior two films. Although Schwarzenegger was a world-renowned bodybuilder, he was 56 years old when he did the third feature. So when he first considered doing the movie, he questioned whether or not he could regain his action-hero physique.
“I think one of the main concerns that I had right at the beginning was can I get my body back in shape where it was twenty years ago in Terminator 1; and twelve years ago in Terminator 2 so it was a challenge,” he said. “Obviously times have changed and I put together a program and went back to the gym and trained two to three hours a day for several months. Even while I was filming, anytime it was available I used a half hour here, an hour there working out with weights to make sure that I come in great shape and not disappoint the fans and not disappoint myself.”
But in order to regain his physique for the big screen, Schwarzenegger confided he had to regain the same mindset he had back in his youth.
“It took a lot of training and a lot of effort not to think about the obstacles that I had a motorcycle accident or that I had surgery,” he added. “You just forget about all this and live in denial and say, ‘OK this is my training now for the Mr. Olympia competition or the Mr. Universe competition’ and I have to be in best shape because I have to win the competition. So with that kind of mentality I approached the whole training.”
