Linda Hamilton explains why she returned for Terminator: Dark Fate

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Not counting her brief voice cameo in TERMINATOR: SALVATION, it's pushing thirty years since Linda Hamilton last played Sarah Connor in a TERMINATOR film, but that all changed when TERMINATOR: DARK FATE came calling. The upcoming film will be ignoring the events of TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES, TERMINATOR: SALVATION, and TERMINATOR: GENISYS, and will serve as a more direct follow-up to James Cameron's TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, but Hamilton told Entertainment Weekly that she never expected to return to the character after all these years.

[Tim Miller] called me three times before I even called him back. The third time, he was like, "It’s about work," and I’m like, "Oh, hey, what’s up?" But, even with that and his big sell, it took me weeks to decide that I really could go there and might have something new to say… It was many, many years of just being sure that it was done, that I was done. I kept saying, "Yeah, yeah, if I’m in one now it’s like the geriatrics era." [Laughs] Which is actually kind of true. I never saw this coming, which made it that much more interesting.

"There is a real gift in that so much time has passed, and that gives me so much more to explore with the character," Hamilton continued. "Sarah Connor is the same person but I wanted to see how the difference in events have changed her and shaped her and send her forward. There was meat there. I didn’t want to just recycle the same idea. It’s a woman who has a different mission, a different story, so I wanted to see what we could do with that."

While some actors compare reprising old roles to riding a bike, Linda Hamilton didn't find it quite that easy to step back into Sarah Connor's combat boots. "One assumes if you put in the same hard work, you get the same results, so I went straight back into training really hard and it’s like, 'Oh my god, you need hormones to put muscle on!'" Hamilton said. "So just starting with the basic cosmetics of the character and all of the things that I had to sort of include in my new reality as Sarah Connor. But, really, it’s about building her backstory and figuring out where she’s been and who she is today. You have a character but so many things have impacted her in the last 30 years that it was like starting over, and yet, there is an echo of the younger Sarah Conner in everything that I had to create." As for where we'll find Sarah Connor once TERMINATOR: DARK FATE begins, Hamilton said that the character is still a wildcard.

She’s a woman without a country. Her original mission has changed due to circumstances and she really doesn’t have a team anymore, she just has a thirst for vengeance, so that makes her very alone. She’s still a wildcard, but a wildcard without a real true mission is a lot more unpredictable. Basically very hard for her to find her humanity, so once again we get to take a journey on that level, to have some deep things that need to be rediscovered for her survival.

TERMINATOR: DARK FATE will hit theaters on November 1, 2019.