That OJ Simpson Terminator Rumor You Heard Is Completely False

No matter what Arnold Schwarzenegger says, James Cameron maintains that he never felt that O.J. Simpson should star in «The Terminator,» and in 2023, the Oscar-winning director reiterated this during an interview with Chris Wallace on the journalist’s show «Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?» According to a report on the episode in Variety, Cameron said, «Very early on, a highly placed person at one of the two studios that funded that film had a brilliant 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!’ I said, ‘I actually think that’s a bad idea.’ It didn’t go anywhere.»

Not only that, but Cameron says that Schwarzenegger’s story about receiving a painting of the Terminator that originally featured Simpson is totally fake too. (Schwarzenegger apparently claimed that if you scratched at the artwork, you could see Simpson’s face underneath his in that same interview with The Independent.) In his Los Angeles Times piece, Cameron said, «Let me correct that right now. Arnold is literally just wrong. I know it’s hard to imagine! You don’t argue with Arnold. I didn’t make the painting for him. I made the painting for us, for the production, of him as the Terminator. There’s no O.J. under that painting.»