Mackenzie Davis, who plays a lead role in Terminator: Dark Fate, tells TheArnoldFans that she hasn’t seen the Terminator films until only recently but felt is was amazing to be a part of this project. I met up with Davis at San Diego Comic Con where she tells us about her earliest introduction to Arnold’s films, her injured hands, bloopers, the torture of a waterfall filming sequence and how she felt about the overwhelming audience reaction to the Terminator presentation in Hall H at Comic Con.
TAF: What was that like for you to hear 6,000 fans cheering after the Terminator: Dark Fate presentation today?
Mackenzie Davis: "It was really overwhelming and just lovely. It’s cool to love Linda Hamilton as much as we do and see people so warmly embrace her and they seem so excited to have her back. It’s so cool."
TAF: I’m with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fan club.
Davis: "Oh cool!"
TAF: What’s your first introduction or memory of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a child and did you see Arnold’s Terminator films in your youth?
Davis: "I didn’t see Terminator until six months before I auditioned for this movie, which was just a total error on the part of my parents for not showing it to me when I was younger. I really loved Twins and Junior growing up. I really loved Junior because, well, what a wild movie that was, right? Those (Twins and Junior) were probably my earliest memories of Arnold."
TAF: Often there are injuries on the set of these big action movies. Did you get any injuries?
Davis: “I had little things. I had weird things going on with me like my hands hurt, they’d get crunched in a way. They almost doubled in size from all the work of lifting things. I just felt like I was falling apart by the end of it. But I wasn’t.”
TAF: It looks like there’s a big water fight in Dark Fate. What was it like for you to physically deal with a lot of tough elements like the water scene of this film?
Davis: “There’s a lot of water! I mean, there’s one piece involving a hummer and a waterfall that will become clearer once we see the movie. We were on like our third week of night shoots and we were so exhausted, I had to keep sort of submitting myself into this waterfall and I would go between this feeling of “God, I don’t want to do this again' and then going 'I can’t believe where I am and what I’m doing' and then thinking this is SO COOL! So I was sort of oscillating between the two thoughts."
TAF: In the film you’ll be playing an enhanced soldier from the future, a major badass, but when you were filming, did you catch yourself doing some funny mistakes or falling down that might lead to some funny bloopers later on the Blu-ray release?
Davis: "For sure. I mean, I don’t know if they’ll have it as a blooper role, but it was an uphill battle for me to learn to be athletic and focus with a sledgehammer and all those things but I’m sure there’s actually lots of horrible b-role footage of me doing some terrible mistakes."
Read my earlier report HERE about that Humvee waterfall scene! Terminator: Dark Fate hits theaters in 3 months of November 1st!