The Mother of Dragons, Breaker of chains, Kahleesi Emilia Clarke takes on the role of Sarah Connor an iconic mother in her own right. In Terminator Genisys Clarke enters the legacy of actresses who’ve played the heroic Connor in this alternative timeline reboot of the Terminator franchise. She talked to press about her training, thoughts on the big shoes she had to fill and what was important in her own interpretation of the role.
On how helpful original Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger was with weapons and stunt work:
Emilia Clarke: He was very helpful, I definitely needed a lot of help. So yeah, he was helpful. I spent most of my training hoping that he would be impressed and getting a good response from him would help me get the confidence to continue on.
Her thoughts on stepping into Linda Hamilton’s shoes and did work on Game of Thrones help on this role?
Emilia Clarke: Yes to all. Yes I grew up watching and being continually inspired by-especially by Linda’s incredible performance so I jumped at the chance to be able to take on this role. It was kinda after that fact. The daunting realization of the enormity of the part. It’s been an absolute dream to be able to take this on. And yeah there are many elements of my work on Game of Thrones that were completely helpful to help me harness the inner bad-ass. the difference between the two is on Game of Thrones I did lot of delegating and then here in this movie I really have to get down and dirty and do a lot of the stunts and gun work and everything. So yeah there were similarities but Sarah Connor is a whole other kind of bad-ass!
And if her previous work with director Alan Taylor on GoT helped the shoot:
Emila Clarke: I dont know. We already know how to get on each others nerves! So we got ahead of the game there. In summation it was brilliant!
What was important to her in creating her own take on Sarah Connor and whether costar Lena Headey (GoT’s Cersei Lannister, who played Sarah on the Sarah Connor Chronicles television series) had any advice:
Emilia Clarke: I think some of the most important things to me in reprising this role was that it was such a daunting thing to be taking on. My ego probably jumped at the chance and the realization kinda crept in. But then getting to read our gorgeous script, the Sarah that we see in this movie is so different. Her spirit is definitely still intact and I really hope that’s seen, you can see the essence of what Linda Hamilton created in Sarah Connor is there. Having such a different upbringing having such a different childhood really the result is a girl who is ahead of the game from where we saw Sarah Connor at this age last. She’s there to save this guy (Kyle Reese) instead of the other way around. There’s a lot of really wonderful differences and that was really important to me to show this kind of history of what Sarah’s been through. No sadly I didn’t speak to her and I can only hope that she was happy with what we managed to make of this.
Terminator Genisys is in theaters now!
