Linda Hamilton Loved Playing Her Own Age in ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’: ‘Old Is the New Black!’

Which, naturally, raises the question of exactly what that might be. Admitting that she doesn’t exactly have a mission statement for Sarah, she did want to explore a fully fleshed-out character in a new situation and at a certain age.

“You start out saying, ‘What do I have to do to look like who I was?’ Then, within a number of months, that idea is shattered, because you have to have hormones to put muscle on. It’s like you can work as hard and not get the same results, so you have to sort of embrace all of that and say, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’ I dyed my hair gray — I actually don’t have gray hair — so that people would immediately see that and go, ‘Whoa, she’s older.’ And you move on from there and create a woman of a certain age and be a different Sarah Connor.”

“She’s no longer the fierce protector,” Linda continues. “She’s just angry and that required a whole other set of acting chops. I had to figure out what needed to come out and it was dark exploring your greatest disappointment and guilt in life and then bringing that feeling up pretty much every day for six months. Do you know how much more tensile strength I have as Linda Hamilton at 63 than I did as Linda Hamilton at 33?! You get to a point where you go, ‘I’m not what I was, I am so much more than that.’ And then the chance to just strip myself of every kind of audience expectation and to just go there — it was just so liberating to not be playing someone who’s beautiful.”

While this will likely be Linda’s final entry in the Terminator universe — and the film’s box office may spell the end of the franchise for a while — it can’t be denied that it’s endured many years that have encompassed a total of six films, a television series, two web series, theme park attractions, video games, novels and comic books. Why the continuing fascination?

“I think that the first film was mesmerizing in its originality and themes that no one had really explored before,” she suggests. “But at the same time it remained a very tight sort of love story. A man comes from the future to protect the woman that’s going to save mankind. It had such scale, but still was a very sort of stripped down love story with some fantastic visual effects. And then for it to grow into something so large second time around where all of those themes of humanity and what mankind is doing to itself and the robot turns everything on its head.”

“We do have to think about what we’re inventing when we invent devices that do everything for us,” she adds, “to the point where we don’t even have to stand up to turn off the lights ourselves anymore. And what we’re really doing is weakening our genome. Evolution and everything still supports the survival of the fittest, but we’re making ourselves lazier. I think a lot of those themes are more important than ever. All of the action is great, but it’s better when you’re given something to think about. Helping that is that we stripped this down to fewer characters than some of the recent films. It doesn’t matter how great the visual effects are. If you’ve got too many characters and none of them are really given time to develop relationships, it’s an empty experience. What we really tried to do was sort of bring it back to relationship, because it doesn’t matter if a thousand people explode in that building if you don’t know and care about one of them.”

Terminator: Dark Fate is available on digital, Blu-ray and DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment.