The new Sarah Connor needs thick skin
CHANNEL ISLAND / SCOTT COLLINS
Lena Headey is healthy and attractive, but some 'Terminator' fans wonder if she has enough muscle for the role.
MAYBE you don't have to be buff to play one of the iconic female characters in contemporary science fiction. But having a tough hide certainly helps, as Lena Headey has discovered.
Headey is the 34-year-old British actress who plays the heroine in Fox's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." The series has a two-night premiere starting Sunday and is perhaps the most highly anticipated new scripted series of this strike-plagued TV midseason. Headey plays the same role made famous by Linda Hamilton, who in the 1991 feature "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" became a butt-kicking inspiration to millions of women by working out, pumping up and helping take down that nasty T-1000 cyborg.
Such an inspiration, in fact, that some who worship at the Altar of Sarah Connor detect heresy in the casting of Headey, who's healthy-looking and attractive but not exactly Ms. Olympia. She could even be described as petite (although, at a hair or two taller than 5 feet 5, she's basically the same height as Hamilton).
One website devoted to female empowerment chose stronger words, such as "emaciated," a dis that Headey recounted last month with a resigned laugh.
"The film had the luxury of more money and more time," Headey told me at a Valley coffee shop last month.
"If they were gonna give me a month, and a trainer every day, and a chef, then it would be fantastic. . . . It's a TV show, for God's sake!"
The bicep debate may seem like sweating the small stuff, but it's just one more hurdle encountered by the "Terminator" franchise on its way to the small screen.
"Sarah Connor" faces the same dilemma stared down earlier this season by NBC's critically drubbed "Bionic Woman": How do you revive a beloved sci-fi franchise without alienating its core base of rabid fans? (Interestingly, Michelle Ryan, the British actress who plays the title character in "Bionic Woman," also caught flak for not meeting fans' expectations.)
Neither director James Cameron nor star and current California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who guided the cyborgs-versus-humans movies to cultural phenomenon status, has anything to do with the series. Cameron's name hangs so heavily over the franchise that during planning sessions the TV producers symbolically left one chair empty to remind them of his contribution, according to David Nutter, who directed the pilot episode.
