James Cameron has dismissed the claim that O.J. Simpson was originally cast as The Terminator.
During an appearance on “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” the filmmaker addressed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s previous claim that before he got the titular role in Cameron’s 1984 sci-fi action movie, Cameron had cast the former American football star.
The “Avatar” director refuted Schwarzenegger’s comments and recalled how Simpson was briefly in the conversation.
“Very early on, a highly placed person at one of the two studios that funded that film had a brilliant idea and called me up and said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ I said, ‘Well, no, I’m not,’” the director recounted. “He said, ‘Are you sitting? OJ Simpson for the Terminator!’ I said, ‘I actually think that’s a bad idea’… It
go anywhere.”
Schwarzenegger had told “The Independent” in a 2019 interview, “It was actually OJ Simpson that was the first-cast Terminator… Somehow (Cameron) felt that he was not as believable for a killing machine. So then they hired me. That’s really what happened.”