O.J. Simpson because the Terminator?
“Avatar” director James Cameron, 68, addressed the rumor that Simpson was purported to star in 1984’s “The Terminator,” during an appearance on HBO Max’s “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?”
On Friday’s episode, Cameron claimed that studio exec Mike Medavoy, co-founder of Orion Pictures, suggested the previous football phenom, 75, should play the lead in the long-lasting motion flick.
Nonetheless, the Canadian native said he refused to solid Simpson.
“Very early on, a highly placed person at certainly one of the 2 studios that funded that film had an excellent idea and called me up and said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ I said, ‘Well, no, I’m not.’ He said, ‘Are you sitting? O.J. Simpson for the Terminator!’” Cameron revealed, per Variety.
The filmmaker went on: “I said, ‘I actually think that’s a foul idea.’ It didn’t go anywhere.”
The Post reached out to Medavoy’s team for comment.
In 2019, the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, watered the grapevine and told the Independent, “It was actually O.J. Simpson that was the first-cast Terminator.”
“One way or the other [Cameron] felt that he was not as believable for a killing machine,” the previous California governor, 75, said. “So then they hired me. That’s really what happened.”
Simpson was convicted of armed robbery after his famous 1995 acquittal for the murders of estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
Schwarzenegger also claimed he had a painting of himself because the motion flick star that originally featured Simpson’s face. He said Cameron painted the piece.
The “Titanic” director refuted the claim in a 2019 profile for the Los Angeles Times, noting that the statement was “flat-out mistaken.”
Cameron, who co-wrote and directed “The Terminator,” said on the time: “I didn’t make the painting for him. I made the painting for us, for the production, of him because the Terminator.”
“There’s no O.J. under that painting … O.J. Simpson was never in the combination in any respect. That was rejected out of hand before it ever got any traction,” he continued.
Cameron, meanwhile, is running on one other profession high, along with his latest film, “Avatar: The Way of Water,” grossing over $1.7 billion on the box office worldwide.
The sequel to his critically acclaimed 2009 sci-fi film arrived 13 years later. The follow-ups are heading in the right direction to debut much faster.
Cameron has already began shooting “Avatar 3” and “Avatar 4.” The third “Avatar” movie is scheduled to be released Dec. 20, 2024.