Linda Hamilton Fled Hollywood, but ‘Terminator’ Still Found Her – The New York Times

She had been working occasionally in TV and had not starred in a major studio film in more than two decades, but Hamilton still had to be convinced to sign on. “It’s not that I was afraid to let the fans down,” she said. “I was afraid to let Sarah Connor down.”

Brainstorming alongside Miller and Cameron, Hamilton helped craft a new iteration of Sarah, now a grizzled lone wolf who must team up with a mechanically enhanced female soldier (Davis) to protect another young woman (Natalia Reyes) targeted by Terminators. The alliance of the three women does not come naturally.

“Sarah is a broken being at the beginning of this film,” Hamilton said. “She’s a woman without a country, adrift and full of rage.” To play her, Hamilton had to dig deeper than she ever had before, learn how to fire a rocket launcher, and get back into fighting shape at age 60. “This was 10 times the effort I put into the second one,” she said.

Hamilton trained in the desert with Green Berets, while doctors put her on a regimen of supplements and bioidentical hormones to build muscle. “I had a true village of experts trying to get the most out of this body,” she said, though vanity wasn’t the mission. “I don’t think there’s going to be one person who comes up to me who says, ‘You look so great for your age.’ I threw that into the Mississippi River, because that’s not what this is about. I want people to see me and go, ‘Oh my God, she got so old!’”

Cameron said that “what’s really cool about it is that a major action picture has been hung on an actress who’s 62.” He was also heartened by the success of a 59-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis as a gray-haired Laurie Strode in last year’s “Halloween” revival. “I think you could cite the examples of that kind of chance being taken previously on one finger.”