(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 2 December 2025 23:30, UK
If you’re a fan of 1980s pop culture, and you want to make the coolest goddamn TV show, and you need a badass for your cast, who do you get? Linda Hamilton.
And so that’s exactly what the Duffer brothers did. They went out, and they signed up a genuine trailblazer for women in action movies, up there with Sigourney Weaver, really, the star of not just that first, jaw-dropping Terminator movie in 1984 but also the peerless T2: Judgement Day seven years later and 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate too.
Hamilton duly joined the fifth season of Stranger Things, currently on literally everyone’s television in the whole wide world, and professed that not only was she a big fan of the show, but that the Duffer brothers had personally expressed how excited they were at the prospect of her signing up, because why wouldn’t they be?
Eagle-eyed viewers will know how much James Cameron’s prescient action franchise has influenced the Duffers, with little easter eggs scattered about, including a cinema in Hawkins, Indiana, playing the first movie, and season three’s Russian assassin, Grigori, being heavily influenced by the robotic Mr Schwarzenegger as the anti-hero himself. The brothers also cited T2 as one of the ten films that everyone should watch before beginning the fifth and final season of their Netflix smash.
While Hamilton is undoubtedly best known for her work on those films, she’s been involved in several major projects over 40 years; she won Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for the ‘80s TV show Beauty and the Beast, and many years later appeared regularly in hit series like Chuck and Weeds. But like many actors, especially those who have been around a long time, she has made a few movies she is not quite as fond of.
Back in the day, she said, “What can I say about King Kong Lives! I was stunned when I saw it. It was the most ridiculous movie. I took the part because Dino’s (producer Dino De Laurentiis) original didn’t hurt Jessica Lange’s career. While we were filming, I never saw one full-size Kong, only a hand or a foot, as I was acting against huge blue screens most of the time. As for Mr Destiny, it was another mediocre movie. I’ve had more than my share of those.”
But she reserved most of her ire for a movie that she made in the same year she broke through with the original Terminator movie, an adaptation of a horror-packed short story featuring a shitload of creepy kids.
She added, “Nothing has beaten Stephen King’s Children of the Corn yet, which still haunts my past as the worst film I’ve made. Can you believe they’re making a sequel? They didn’t dare ask me to reprise that role!”
Despite getting very mixed reviews from critics, Children of the Corn was actually a fairly sizable hit on release in 1984, pulling in almost five times its budget at the box office and spawning not just the sequel that Hamilton referenced, but a franchise that had reached ten different instalments by 2023 and the release of the most recent film.
As per his usual wont with movie adaptations of his books, King was very annoyed by the direction taken by the filmmakers on the original, arguing over the phone with them about the script and telling the main writer that he didn’t understand the horror genre.
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