The director originally had a much different role for him in mind.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been almost forty years since James Cameron changed movies forever with the release of The Terminator in 1984. At just 30 years old, this was Cameron’s breakthrough, with his only other feature film being the low-budget Piranha II: The Spawning in 1981. His story about a cyborg sent from the future to kill the mother of a future leader of a resistance against robots who have taken over the Earth set Cameron on a path to becoming one of the most influential filmmakers ever. Before any of that could happen, however, Cameron needed to find the perfect face for his robotic monster. As we all know, the role went to Arnold Schwarzenegger, sending his career into the stratosphere, but before it did, there was talk of another famous name playing the part. Then one conversation with James Cameron changed everything, shaping history into the form we now know it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Says O.J. Simpson Was the First Choice
In 1984, James Cameron might not have been famous yet, but Arnold Schwarzenegger was. He was the larger-than-life, Austrian bodybuilder who had won seven Mr. Olympias and four Mr. Universe bodybuilding titles before transitioning to acting with roles in films such as Conan the Barbarian in 1982.

Two years later, the same year a Conan the Barbarian sequel Conan the Destroyer was released, Arnold met with the unproven Cameron about his next project, a film with a much bigger scope than killer fish. In a 2022 interview with Graham Bensinger, Schwarzenegger went into great detail about what those early interactions with James Cameron were like. Arnold said that when he got involved with the film, O.J. Simpson, then a beloved retired NFL running back who had transitioned to acting, was supposed to be the Terminator, with Schwarzenegger playing Kyle Reese, the good guy role who protects Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and fights against the Terminator. The role would eventually go to Michael Biehn. Arnold was told that he’d be meeting Cameron for lunch, because Cameron had to sign off on him playing Reese.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Convinced James Cameron To Give Him the Terminator Role Instead

At the lunch, Schwarzenegger told Cameron his thoughts about the film, focusing on the Terminator, who he wouldn’t even be playing. He brought up Yul Brenner’s killer robotic performance from Westworld. “Everything was kind of off because he was not like a human being, there was something wrong here, but you couldn’t identify exactly what it was.” Arnold was fascinated by Brenner’s mechanical movements and told Cameron that whoever played Terminator had to be trained to act like a machine. “He cannot go and look down and have the magazine be put into the gun… This has to be done like a machine, therefore he has to be trained blindfolded.”
Schwarzenegger said Cameron was impressed by his opinion and completely agreed. So right then and there he told Arnold, “There’s no one who will understand the Terminator better than you, so therefore, I think we’re all in agreement that you should play the Terminator.” To this, Arnold said no. He saw playing the Terminator, who barely had any lines, as a regression in his acting career. He wanted to be Reese, who had all the lines and was more of a challenge. Cameron would not be dissuaded so easily. He told Arnold, “Trust me, I will shoot the character so that you’re not only the number one villain they’ve ever seen, but the number one hero.” Cameron told Schwarzenegger to go home and think about it for a few days. He did just that, going back and forth between visualizing himself as the hero and the villain. “Eventually one day I woke up and said to myself, you know, he’s right. It would be the most memorable character if it’s played right.”

According to James Cameron, O.J. Simpson Was Never a Serious Choice
This interview is not the only time Schwarzenegger has brought up that O.J. Simpson was the first choice to be the Terminator. It’s come up in other interviews as well, including in 2019 with The Independent. “It was actually O.J. Simpson that was the first cast Terminator. Then somehow [James Cameron] felt that he was not as believable for a killing machine. So then they hired me. That’s really what happened.” Schwarzenegger continued that he had actual proof of this, saying, “On the painting that I have at home – it was painted by Jim Cameron. Underneath my face is actually O.J. Simpson’s face. It was already painted on it, with the leather jacket and the gun in the hand. I have the painting in my office. So if anyone would ever scrape off the part of my face, underneath will be O.J.”
With such a shocking revelation, of course someone would have to ask James Cameron if it was true that Simpson was the first choice for what would become such an iconic character. In 2019, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Cameron flat-out said, “Arnold is literally just wrong.” Cameron said it was the head of Orion, Mike Medavoy, who called Cameron and pitched the idea of O.J. Simpson as the Terminator and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Kyle Reese. “[Producer and co-screenwriter] Gale Hurd and I looked at each other like that was the stupidest thing we’d ever heard in our lives,” said Cameron. “And I told him on that phone call, ‘It’s not O.J. Simpson. We’re not doing that.’ And he said, ‘Well, will you meet with Arnold Schwarzenegger?’”
Cameron talked about meeting Arnold at that fateful lunch and how the idea of him playing Reese didn’t make much sense because he wasn’t a very articulate guy. As Schwarzenegger went on and on about the Terminator character, Cameron thought, “He’d make a pretty damn good Terminator. He’d be a human bulldozer!’” And as for Arnold’s Terminator painting? Cameron said that was a gift for Arnold after the movie and that there’s no O.J. Simpson underneath.
Who knows who is telling the truth here? It probably lies somewhere in the middle between Schwarzenegger’s and Cameron’s recollections. Arnold may be pumping up (pun intended) the backstory of the film for attention, or Cameron might be trying to downplay Simpson’s role because of what would happen in O.J.’s life later. If the man who almost starred in your first big film later became infamous for the crime of the century, would you want to go around talking about how you had almost hired him? Would we celebrate the film and its sequel with such a controversial person as its star, or would we push it aside as something to be ashamed of and forgotten? And what would have become of Arnold Schwarzenegger if he’d been miscast as Kyle Reese instead? Would the action career that dominated the next decade have ever happened? Thankfully, we’ll never know.

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