Terminator

Lance was Jim Cameron's original choice to play the mute killing machine. "Jim and I were going to take into the company to get it done," Lance says, "and I said 'I'll go in as the Terminator to make them feel what this movie's going to be like.' I got dressed up and got into the mode of the character and went in and scared shit outta them. But the thing is in those days I was nobody, so when they cast Arnold I didn't care, as long as Jim got his movie done."

"My characterisations would have been a lot more frightening," he continues. "Arnold was like this bulldozer killing machine and mine would have been more Machiavellian. I always told Jim I wanted to stand in doorways and completely shut down so you would walk by not knowing who or what he was."

Lance has a great deal of admiration for James Cameron, "Jim arrives on set before anyone's there and he leaves after everybody's left. As the Irish say, he's the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. He knew exactly what he wanted to do with that movie. Every dollar's on the screen."

Copyright SFX #76, Spring 2001.

"This is the way it really went down", says Henriksen of a role that almost changed his life. The Terminator, if you remember came out of nowhere, it was Jim's private dream. We'd first met on his first film "Piranha II: The Spawning, and he came round to my house as he was imagining it, and painted me as the Terminator. I have that painting, and it's beautiful - of me, half Terminator, half-human."

"He was so excited about the movie, he got me excited, and I said, "Jim, when you meet the people who are thinking of producing it, why don't I go in first as the Terminator? So I walked in and scared the piss out of them. And then Jim arrived five minutes later. "

".. I probably didn't have much chance of getting the role. But I was a tiny piece of getting the film done. And Jim was a friend. So that was ok with me."

About working with Jim Cameron: "Well listen," he chuckles darkly, "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. There is an obsession with the suffering aspect. I would really like to have a painless war, but it's not possible. When you do a movie you're at war, the entire world is in wait to see if you're going to fucking fail. Jim is very tough, but I have ultimate respect for him. We hit it off immediately making Piranha II because we both have the ability to make something happen, with almost no money. Money and fame didn't change him. He was voracious from the start."

Interview by Nick Hasted in Unut, May 2001.

Lance admits: "Oh God that was so much fun! Paul Winfield (Lt Traxler) and I joked that the relationship between those guys would make a geat TV series." And about a sequel, "You never see me die, so I was telling Jim Cameron that it could start in a hospital with me covered with scars saying, 'Look if this guy came once, he's gonna come again.'"