O.J. Simpson Almost Cast as the Terminator but Producers Thought He Wasn’t Believable as ‘Killing Machine’: Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger has long maintained that O.J. Simpson was the original choice to play his now-iconic role in 1984's Terminator — despite pushback on the claim from the film's director, James Cameron.

Now, in Arnold, a new Netflix docuseries about Schwarzenegger's life, the duo is finally teaming up to reveal the full story behind the notorious football player's connection to the blockbuster.

As Cameron recalls in the docuseries, Mike Medavoy, co-founder of Orion Pictures, the film's distributor, wanted to cast Simpson as the Terminator and Schwarzenegger as resistance fighter Kyle Reese (later played by Michael Biehn).

"I had been told by Mike Medavoy that the movie was all cast. 'I got this all worked out. O.J. Simpson and Arnold Schwarzenegger,'" Cameron says in the doc, per Insider. "I said, 'Well, which is which?' Those two names just sounded so wrong to me."

According to Schwarzenegger, Medavoy's colleagues at Orion weren't as convinced that Simpson would be believable in the role. "During our conversation, it became clear no one was hooked to O.J. Simpson playing Terminator because he could not be sold as a killing machine," says the actor.

"This was when everybody loved him, and ironically that was part of the problem — he was this likable, goofy, kind of innocent guy," Cameron told Entertainment Weekly in 2014.

That perception changed drastically a decade later when Simpson was accused of killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. In 1995, Simpson was acquitted of the murders, though a civil court awarded a judgment against him for their wrongful deaths in 1997.

In the doc, Schwarzenegger reveals how Cameron convinced him to play the role, despite a relative lack of speaking lines and his reluctance to play a villain. "I said, 'Look, whoever it is, he has to go and be totally unlike a human being,'" the actor says. "The way he steps on the motorcycle, the way he runs, the way he gets up. Everything has to be exactly like a machine. [Cameron] says, 'Why don't you play the Terminator? You totally understand that character. You are the machine.'" 

After thinking about the proposal for three days, Schwarzenegger says, "I called him back, and I said, 'Every time I reread it, I visualize myself more and more playing Terminator.' I told him I'm in, and then we started prepping."

Arnold debuts on Netflix on June 7.