10 Iconic Movie Villains (Almost Played By Someone Else)

A punchy, pacy low budget technoir thriller, The Terminator made both director James Cameron and star Arnold Schwarzenegger into the biggest names making the biggest movies. But things could have been very different if executives at studio Hemdale had their way.

We could instead have been watching Sting travel back in time to save Sarah Connor from OJ Simpson as the monosyllabic murderous android, in which case it's very possible that the movie wouldn't have been the iconic franchise starter that it became.

Big name action stars including Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson had already turned down the role of the emotionless unstoppable robot from the future, feeling that there simply wasn't enough to work with in a character who only delivered seventeen lines in the whole movie. That was when the studio suggested OJ.

The former American football star had been slowly building up a career for himself as a movie actor and certainly had the physical build to play a destructive mechanical monster.

Cameron, however, rejected him outright. His reasoning? OJ had simply too nice a persona ever to convince as a cold blooded killer! And, hey, maybe the jury that acquitted him in his later murder trial felt the same way.