Terminator Characters: The Main Heroes, Villains and Machines

The main Terminator characters are Sarah Connor, John Connor and Kyle Reese among the humans, and the T-800, T-1000, T-X and Rev-9 among the machines, spread over six films released between 1984 and 2019. The saga opened with The Terminator (1984), directed by James Cameron, and later films came from Jonathan Mostow, McG, Alan Taylor and Tim Miller. Several roles have been recast, most of all John Connor, who is played by four actors across the films. Where a character has a profile, the name links to it, and the terminator movies hub covers the films themselves.

The human core of the saga is the Connor family and Kyle Reese, joined in later films by Marcus Wright, Grace and Daniella "Dani" Ramos.

Sarah Connor is the waitress in 1984 Los Angeles whom a cyborg assassin from 2029 is sent to kill, because her unborn son will one day lead the human resistance against Skynet. Linda Hamilton played her in The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Terminator: Dark Fate, while Emilia Clarke took the part in Terminator Genisys (2015). In the second film she is locked in a psychiatric hospital for trying to stop the nuclear war she knows is coming.

John Connor is that son, and he has the most recasts of any character: Edward Furlong in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Nick Stahl in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Christian Bale in Terminator Salvation (2009) and Jason Clarke in Terminator Genisys. He is a boy living with foster parents in the second film and a leading figure of the Resistance by 2018.

Kyle Reese is the soldier sent back from the future to protect Sarah in 1984, played by Michael Biehn. Anton Yelchin plays a young Kyle Reese in Terminator Salvation, and Jai Courtney takes the role in Terminator Genisys.

Marcus Wright, played by Sam Worthington, is a death row inmate who in 2003 signs his body over to the Cyberdyne researcher Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter), then wakes in the ruined world of 2018 with no memory of the years between. Grace, played by Mackenzie Davis, is an augmented soldier from the future who arrives to protect Dani Ramos, a young factory worker in Mexico City played by Natalia Reyes.

Several supporting characters recur or matter to the plot. Miles Dyson is the Cyberdyne engineer played by Joe Morton in the second film and by Courtney B. Vance in Genisys, where Dayo Okeniyi plays his son Danny Dyson. Earl Boen plays Dr. Peter Silberman in the first three films, credited as Silberman in the first, Dr. Silberman in the second and Dr. Peter Silberman in the third.

The female characters are led by Sarah Connor, followed by Kate Brewster, Grace and Dani Ramos, with Dr. Serena Kogan as a smaller role in Terminator Salvation.

Kate Brewster, played by Claire Danes in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, is a veterinarian who becomes John Connor's ally and one of the people Skynet targets. Grace and Dani Ramos anchor Terminator: Dark Fate alongside Linda Hamilton's returning Sarah Connor. Kristanna Loken plays the T-X in the third film, so the machine side has a female villain too.

The central villain is Skynet, the machine network that starts the war, and the killers it sends through time are the T-800, the T-1000, the T-X and the Rev-9.

Skynet takes different forms from film to film. In Terminator Salvation it is the defense network that turns on humanity and starts a nuclear war, and in Terminator Genisys Matt Smith is credited as Alex / Skynet. In Terminator: Dark Fate the enemy of Grace's timeline is a defense AI called Legion, which is a separate system rather than a rename.

The individual machines are easier to tell apart. The T-1000 is the liquid metal killer played by Robert Patrick in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Lee Byung-hun is credited as Cop / T-1000 in Genisys. The T-X is the more advanced shapeshifting machine sent to 2003 to murder the future leaders of the resistance. The Rev-9, played by Gabriel Luna and credited as Gabriel / REV-9, can split into a liquid metal body and a hard endoskeleton.

The main Terminator models in the films are the T-800, T-1000, T-X and Rev-9, and the same T-800 design appears under several nicknames.

The T-800 is the cyborg assassin of 1984, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and credited simply as Terminator in the first film. He is billed as The Terminator in the next two films, as Guardian / The Terminator in Genisys, where Sarah Connor calls him Pops, and as T-800 / Carl in Dark Fate. The male Terminator characters are the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) and the Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna). Genisys adds a twist, because John Connor himself is turned into a nanotech machine hybrid that serves Skynet. For how the models differ in design and capability, the terminator models guide covers each one.

The main cast of the Terminator films is led by Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor and Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese, with Schwarzenegger credited in five of the six films and Hamilton in three.

Schwarzenegger appears in The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Genisys and Terminator: Dark Fate, and is absent from the cast list of Terminator Salvation. According to Fox News, Dark Fate put Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger on screen together after 28 years. Michael Biehn, billed second in 1984, is the original Kyle Reese. The full lineup, with the directors, is on the terminator cast page.

The T-800 is the one character who is rewritten almost every time, and following him is the clearest way to see what each film wanted from its hero.

In 1984 he is the threat. The Terminator arrives naked in Los Angeles, works through the women named Sarah Connor in the phone book, and keeps coming after being stripped down to a metal frame, until the factory chase where Reese dies helping Sarah destroy him. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day the same actor is sent back as a reprogrammed protector. After he rescues John from the T-1000 at the mall, John orders him not to kill people, and that rule gives the film its moral frame. The steel mill ending, with Sarah lowering him into the vat as he gives John a thumbs up, closes the loop by having the protector insist on his own destruction so Cyberdyne's technology cannot lead to Skynet.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines repeats the protector idea with a darker turn. The T-X takes over the Terminator and orders him to kill John, and he forces his own shutdown to resist. At Crystal Peak he crashes a helicopter into the T-X and uses his last fuel cell to hold the bunker door open. Compared with the second film, his sacrifice does not prevent Judgment Day, because John and Kate learn that it cannot be stopped. Terminator Genisys then recasts the idea as family: Sarah has been raised since childhood by a reprogrammed Terminator she calls Pops, and he traps John inside the reactor field of the time machine, then is rebuilt from liquid metal debris. Terminator: Dark Fate goes furthest. The T-800 that killed John Connor in 1998 later lives as a man named Carl, has developed a conscience and joins the fight against the Rev-9, and at the hydroelectric dam he holds the Rev-9 in place while Dani destroys it with Grace's power core.

In my opinion, the second film remains the template the later ones answer. Each sequel keeps the protector and changes what he costs: his life in the second and third films, a surrogate father role in Genisys, and a guilt-driven second chance in Dark Fate, where he is the machine that killed John.

Sarah Connor is the most consistent character because each version of her answers the same question: what happens to a person who knows the future is coming. Her path is easy to trace through three performances.

In The Terminator Linda Hamilton plays a waitress who learns the truth only when Reese finds her, and the film ends with her recording audio tapes in Mexico for her unborn son and driving toward an approaching storm. By Terminator 2: Judgment Day she has been locked in a psychiatric hospital for warning about the war, and John thinks she is delusional. When she goes to kill Miles Dyson but cannot do it, the film shows how far she has traveled from the woman in the first film. In Terminator: Dark Fate she has spent decades hunting Terminators after the T-800 killed John in front of her, and she receives tip-off messages that lead the group to the U.S. and Mexico border. Emilia Clarke's version in Terminator Genisys is a different case: that Sarah is already a hardened fighter in 1984 because history has been altered, so she skips the learning stage the other films dramatize.

The heroes of the later films are built as echoes of the 1984 pairing of Reese and Sarah. Kyle Reese is the soldier sent back to protect a woman who must survive, and Grace in Terminator: Dark Fate is the same job reshaped: an augmented soldier from 2042 who protects Dani Ramos, the person who is destined to lead the human resistance against Legion. The difference is that Reese is an ordinary soldier whose death is part of the plan, since he fathers John, while Grace is a mortally wounded protector who tells Dani to use her power core as a weapon.

Marcus Wright in Terminator Salvation is the one new hero who is a machine. He learns that Skynet rebuilt him to lure John into a trap, breaks free of its control, and gives his own heart for John's transplant. In my opinion, he is the closest the series comes to making a Terminator the protagonist rather than the guardian, which makes the heart transplant a deliberate reversal of the T-800's sacrifices.

John Connor appears in more eras than any other character, which explains the four actors. He is a boy in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Edward Furlong), a drifter living off the grid in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Nick Stahl), a Resistance officer raiding a Skynet base in Terminator Salvation (Christian Bale) and the leader of the 2029 attack on Skynet in Terminator Genisys (Jason Clarke). The recasts follow the change in age and setting rather than a single reboot, and the first film shows him only as an unborn son.

The part has also been a cast-management problem elsewhere in the series. In Terminator 3, TV Guide reported that Claire Danes replaced the originally cast Kate Brewster actor three weeks into filming, and CBS News reported that the first choice was a bit too young for the part. That kind of mid-shoot change is a reminder that the supporting characters around John have shifted as much as he has.

If you want to see where each of these characters sits in the story, the terminator timeline puts the films in order, which helps most for the recast roles.