Detailed Terminator Art Imagines James Cameron’s Original T-800 Casting

The Terminator art imagines the T-800 as James Cameron originally intended to cast the character before Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cameron and Schwarzenegger became a formidable action movie team thanks to 1984’s original Terminator, starring Schwarzenegger as a seemingly indestructible cyborg sent back in time to murder the mother of the future world’s savior. But true fans of The Terminator know that Schwarzenegger was not always Cameron’s choice to play the movie’s terrifyingly relentless robot assassin the T-800, and that Lance Henriksen was originally tapped to fill the role

A fan artist has now gone the extra mile to bring Cameron’s original non-Schwarzenegger T-800 casting to life, crafting an incredibly detailed and lifelike sculpture of Henriksen as the star of The Terminator.

Peter Murphy’s artwork features Henriksen’s T-800 with his metallic endoskeleton partially exposed, and brandishing the movie’s iconic .45 Longslide with laserlock sight. Murphy says the artwork was based on Cameron’s own early concept art of Henriksen as the Terminator.

How The Terminator Would Have Been Different With Henriksen As The T-800

Henriksen may not have embodied an android killer in The Terminator, but he did get to play a different role in the movie, and later played the kindly android Bishop in Cameron’s Aliens. Obviously, Henriksen as the T-800 would have been something entirely different from Schwarzenegger’s take on the character, given the two actors’ wildly contrasting physical presences.

Henriksen can surely play menace as well as anyone, but he is not as imposing as Schwarzenegger, and would have brought a totally different physicality to the role. Indeed, Henriksen’s more normal appearance was considered an asset by Cameron, as it was the writer-director’s initial idea to conceive the Terminator as being able to blend in with regular humans. But the decision was ultimately made to rework the T-800, making him an unstoppable killing machine who had no interest in being inconspicuous. Schwarzenegger made perfect sense as that type of Terminator, but would have been laughable as a robot trying to pass itself off as a regular person in the 1980s.

The world will never know what The Terminator would have been like with Henriksen as a stealthier T-800, but it’s hard to argue with the results that were achieved with Schwarzenegger in the role, as the film went on to be a classic of the action genre. Thankfully for Cameron, he did get to later work in his inconspicuous Terminator idea through Robert Patrick’s shape-shifting T-1000 in the blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Source: Peter Murphy/Instagram