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Yes, I was approached. But that third movie was without Jim at the helm and I understood his value to the franchise. And I did feel that the character arc was very complete, back then. The simple sort of way of saying it [about not returning then] was, ‘I’m going to retire a cham- pion. I’m not coming back for ‘one more bout’. I didn’t want to milk that cash cow! I felt like I had said my piece and that it was whole enough. I didn’t want to mess with it. But then you say, ‘It’s 28 years later…’ and I was like, ‘Oh, yes, I see what this one could be!’ You know, I never saw this one coming. I never thought I’d be coming back to play Sarah Connor. People have asked me that question for decades now and I was always like, ‘Nuh-huh! Who wants to see the geriatric Sarah Connor!’ I just couldn’t ever really see it coming back. But with all of those vulnerabilities that come with being this age as a woman, I just thought, ‘Why not? We’re going to make ‘old’ the new ‘black’! Let’s do it!’ [Laughs] That was my mission statement for this film: ‘Old is the new black.’”
Tim says that it was Jim who first called you about this movie. What was that call like? Between the start of this whole franchise and now, you’ve been married and divorced, and are now back working with each other… Well, let me tell you, he had to call me three times to get me to call him back [laughs]. And the third time he called he [left a message that] was like, ‘Hey… It’s about work!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, hey, what’s up?’ [Laughs] But, you know, we have raised a child together. In every way, we have built our own tribe. We have raised a child together, and that’s what has to happen for the child to be healthy, to know that both of their parents are on the same page. In their corner. So, we have worked hard to maintain that, and have been rather successful at it, I think. I will do anything, and have done over the years, to generate as much goodwill for our family unit. So, that really has not been an issue. And also, I respect his work. Still, when I did [laughs] finally call him back, and got the notice that this is what they were considering, that this was what they wanted, it still took me weeks and weeks and weeks to decide that I was in.
Why did that decision take so long? Because on a general wellness level, I had moved myself away. I live in New Orleans now. I don’t live the Hollywood life. I never really did, but I got out of here [Los Angeles] about seven years ago. I got myself a farm in Virginia – a very bleak, real farm. There was no air-conditioning and it was never warm enough in the winter. I lived very authentically, until my parents died, and then I wanted to try New Orleans, because I wanted to try a new thing and knew I’d never go back to LA – I never go backwards, only somewhere new. So, when it came to this decision, I didn’t know if I wanted to invite all of that back into my world. I loved my neighbours and my neighbourhood. I was living happily ever after, in a way that just felt so real. And there is a part of me that feels that what took me out of Los Angeles was a rejection of Hollywood and all the grandiosity and the inflated egos, inflated boobs and inflated lips. The inflated self-worth. If you could have seen my bleak farm, you’d be like, ‘Wow, she really went the other way!’ [Laughs] And in New Orleans I’d found a really nice balance. And I wasn’t sure if I was willing to trade that for another 15 minutes of fame.
So, what changed your mind? Well, I wish I could say there was one moment where it crystallized
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and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m in!’ But, really, it was a real struggle of thought and projection and exploring myself. In the end, I love to work. I love to work. I might not like all the trimmings that come with it, and the whole celebrity thing – I am very stable and middle-class – but I love the work. I love steady. I have a very steady life. But, in the end, I love to work. It’s not that there hasn’t been other work, because there has been just enough to keep me going, but this has been the hardest and the greatest thing I have ever done, this one. It paid me back. It paid me back so much.
In what way? In how it was so huge and so hard because these films have just grown so much since my last effort of this kind of huge blockbuster. So, there was a lot of catching up to do. Trying to keep it trim. We really tried to keep this one stripped down, back |to the basics. To really strip away to characters that relate to each other in a meaningful way – otherwise, you [the audience] are never going to care! You know, you can do the biggest action scene in the world, but if you don’t have characters you’re rooting for, it’s just kind of mind-numbing. And blockbusters and |technology has changed. We would do huge sequences, like the huge sequence on the highway [where Sarah first meets Dani and Grace]. We rehearsed the crap out of that, so that it was almost automatic. To do that, I had to unlearn some of my behaviours from 1991, where we didn’t do things that way.
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