When it comes to Terminator, everyone thinks of the iron-clad state elder, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact, when the first Terminator was released in 1984, the male number one was Michael Bean, who played Kyle Reese. In the film, John Connor sends Kyle Reese back to 1984 to stop the Terminator T-800 and save his mother, Sarah Connor.
"Terminator" was the starting point for director James Cameron to reach the top, and for Michael Bean, who was only 28 years old at the time, this was also the starting point for him to become a Hollywood superstar, but what he did not expect was that his debut was the peak, and then he slid all the way down and eventually became unknown.
What really happened to Michael Bean?
1. Terminator 1984
When he first received the Terminator script, Michael Bean wasn't very satisfied. It's not that the story is bad, the story is good, he likes the character of Kyle Rees, and he thinks he can grasp the love story between Kyle and the heroine Sarah very well. What Bean was not satisfied with was Schwarzenegger, who played with him.
At least in the beginning, Bean most wanted to work with actors like Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, and he could take it to the next level. At the time, in Hollywood's eyes, Schwarzenegger was still just a bodybuilding champion, not an actor.
Aside from Schwarzenegger, there are many other factors that are uncertain about Terminator. Director James Cameron's previous glorious deeds were fired during the filming of "Piranha 2", and he was also food poisoned in Rome. When he learned that the director was Cameron, Bean's first reaction was, "Who is this man?" "The concept of robot hunting and killing also seems to be full of B-grade films. However, at the insistence of agent Ed Limato, Michael Bean agreed to star in The Terminator.
terminator
It is necessary to say more about Ed Limato, who in the 80s and 90s was a hollywood celebrity agent, and he was a string of superstars such as Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Liam Nisson, MichelLe Fiver, Denzel Washington and so on. In Limato's view, Michael Bean already has the basic conditions for becoming a Hollywood star, good looking, serious, down-to-earth, able to act, good personality, half a foot has stepped into the circle.
When Ed Limato first met Michael Bean, he arranged for him to work with Lauren Whitecour, a big star in classical Hollywood, to star in "The Fan".
Deadly movie fans
Unfortunately, this movie was filmed and the box office reputation was very poor. Although it did not become a hit as expected, Bean was not affected, conscientious, shooting advertisements, filming television, steady and steady, and could earn $100,000 a year, and the days were moist.
For Michael Bean, to be red, there is only one missing opportunity. Ed Limato decided with decades of old-fashioned eyes that Terminator was Michael Bean's chance. If you miss it, Bean is about to turn 30 and want to be a big star again, it's hard.
Being in Terminator means a lot to Michael Bean. He fell in love with Linda Hamilton, who played Sarah Connor. Bean said, "I fell in love with her when I was making the movie, I got married, she got married, but the two of us were by no means mixed, she was cute and funny, beautiful and sexy." ”
Linda Hamilton also likes Michael Bean, admitting that the two were very active when they were making Terminator. In a way, this is also the effect that the film wants to achieve. It's not just a B-grade sci-fi movie where machines hunt humans down, it's also a film with a sense of truth, the core of which is the love between Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor.
Terminator producer and Cameron's then-wife, Gayle Anne Hurd, said, "He said, 'Sarah, I love you, I'm coming through time for you,' and it has to be convincing, or the audience will have to leave when they see it." ”
Perhaps most importantly, Michael Bean and James Cameron have a great relationship. Cameron quickly dispelled Bean's suspicions about him with his own ability, and it can even be said that Bean fell to the ground with admiration for Cameron. Cameron also found that Bean was a good actor with the keenness and professionalism of an actor.
In the passage where Kyle Rees is caught by the police for interrogation, Bean feels that as a battle-hardened future warrior, Reese should have been aware of the existence of the double-sided mirror, and he will go to the mirror and ask who is in charge. Cameron took his advice. Cameron said, "I found him (Michael Bean) to work well together, he was smart enough to know how to perform a play, we got into rhythm very quickly, we trusted each other and the camera loved him.""
Bean is also not the sum of Cameron on one front. After a day of shooting, Cameron usually asked the actors to go through the log again, but Bean always rushed home to sleep after the shooting. One day at noon, Gayle Anne Hurd called Bean to ask him to come over to see came to see the rough cut that Cameron had just finished. As a result, Bean found Cameron at Cameron's house cutting the film while preparing for the next new film. That movie is Alien 2. Bean was stunned, and he said, "That person is a machine at all."
2. Alien grudges
Terminator was a huge success. With a production cost of $6.4 million, it grossed $37.7 million in the first round of screenings alone, and Cameron took his first steps to becoming the most successful director of all time. Michael Bean also received a lot of attention as the male lead, but compared to the sensation of the movie, the gaze cast on Bean was somewhat insignificant.
Cameron soon threw himself into the filming of Alien 2, and Bean initially thought he could continue to work with Cameron, and Corporal Hicks in Alien 2 was a good fit for his role, not to mention that the two worked well together in Terminator.
To his disappointment, Cameron wanted to have a different direction and did not give the role to Bean, but instead had James Rimal play Corporal Hicks. However, Rimal himself was not angry, and within a few weeks of filming, he was kicked out of the crew due to drug overdose, and finally Michael Bean played Hicks.
Like Terminator, the absolute protagonist of Alien 2 is a woman, Ripley, played by Sigour. Weaver was also nominated for the 2nd Year Academy Award for Best Actress with Repley.
She has a high opinion of Michael Bean's addition, saying, "Michael is so good at acting that you're almost in love with him, he knows what Jim (Cameron) is worth, knows what he wants most, what he's looking for, he has had such a great experience (filming with James Cameron). ”
Sigourney Weaver and Michael Bean
Michael Bean's memories of Alien 2 are basically beautiful.
He and Sigourney Weaver got along well, and became close friends with Bill Paxton, who played Soldier Hudson, and the two worked on a total of five films, namely 1983's The Ring of Honor, 1984's Terminator, 1986's Alien 2, 1990's SEAL General, and 1993's Tombstone Town. The two also sneaked into 20th Century Fox's "Alien 2" screening in New York to watch the full version of the film.
Bean (second from left) and Paxton (first from right)
Alien 2 eventually grossed $130 million worldwide, received seven Oscar nominations, and won awards for Best Sound Editing and Best Visual Effects.
To Michael Bean's embarrassment, he's once again in the exact same situation as Terminator, where everyone is talking about Alien and Ripru and no one seems to care about him. What Bean did not expect was that in the later "Alien 3", his character was suddenly killed, completely negating James Cameron's design in "Alien 2" in the story setting.
Alien 2
It is said that in the original "Alien 3" story, there will be a scene in which Hicks, played by Michael Bean, is broken out of the chest by the alien, but is rejected by the angry Bean. In the end, he only appeared in the form of a photo in Alien 3.
Sigourney Weaver later stepped forward to speak for Bean. She said, "I don't know how it would happen if Cameron directed Alien 3, and I think [Ripley and Hicks] would develop a more serious relationship, and it would be great to see that because I think he (Hicks) is equal to Ripley in terms of power, which is something you haven't seen her experience." ”
Cameron, Bean, Weaver
Bean himself is obsessed with Alien 3. He said, "I haven't seen this since Alien 2, I haven't seen Alien 3, 4, 5, and I haven't seen Alien: Covenant. I don't watch any movie that I once approached, or that I wanted to act in but didn't make it. There's no reason to put myself in the kind of pain that I could have done better than that thing. ”
After Alien 2, Bean starred again in Cameron's film The Abyss. In Cameron's spectrum, The Abyss is not too well-known and the response is average, and the film as a whole is more like a test of computer imaging technology, and the more perfect technology is not until he portrayed the T-1000 in Terminator: Judgment Day in 1991.
abyss
3. Frustrated 90s
By the end of the 80s, many people listed Michael Bean as a representative star of the 80s, but he himself never recognized it. In his opinion, Bruce Willis is the star of the 80s, Tom Cruise is the star of the 80s, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Mel Gibson, these people can be called the stars of the 80s. They were paid $20 million for a movie, and he couldn't even get $1 million for himself.
Bean once wanted to play Tim Burton in Batman, but the role ended up going to Michael Keaton. In the '90s, agent Ed Limato brokered him to star in Tombstone Town, a Western in which he partnered with Kurt Russell and Fang Kimmer.
Tombstone Town was supposed to be a turning point for Michael Bean, and the Western was still brave in Hollywood, but it backfired. Tombstone Town did not reverse Bean's astrological fortunes, but it made Fang Kimmer. Holliday, played by Fang Kimmer, is exactly the role That Bean wants to play. After "Tombstone Town", Fang Kimmer starred in "Batman Forever" and "The Line of Fire" with Robert De Niro, heading to the peak of his life. These are the things that Michael Bean once longed for.
As for the movie "Tombstone Town", it is a name in film history with the change of director. The film was produced for 12 weeks, and in week 4, the producer Disney replaced director and screenwriter Kevin Jarr and hired George W. Bush, who had worked with the former on First Blood. P. Cosmatus top class. But in reality, the Cosmatus is just a puppet, and the real director of Tombstone Town is the film's first male protagonist, Kurt Russell.
Tombstone Town
According to Bean's later account, despite the change of directors, Disney did not seem to have the intention of extending the production cycle, and the 12-week production time was not allowed to be delayed for a day. Then he watched as Russell and producer James Jax stormed a room with a 130-page script. As for the script before the change, Bean said, "The story is more gray, there are not so many good people and bad people."
After the Tombstone Town controversy, almost no one cared about Michael Bean's situation. From 1993 to 1996, Bean starred in a string of unheard-of films that could be called super unpopular even in today's well-connected Douban.
No one has seen it.
By 1996, when Bean reappeared as an unnamed cannon fodder dragon suit in Michael Bay's Daredevil Island, not many people really remembered him, let alone recognized him.
Brave the Island of Death
In hindsight, Michael Bean's decline was for a number of reasons.
First, he and James Cameron are too closely bound, which can be said to be a success and a cameron. In the movies he starred in in the early days, although he was the male protagonist, the real protagonist was always James Cameron and the IP he created himself, and Michael Bean was always that beautiful accessory.
Second, beauty is beautiful, but it is not recognizable enough. Bean did not look up to Schwarzenegger at first, but Schwarzenegger's huge body and steely muscles stole the limelight of his male protagonist, so that he became the spokesperson for the Terminator IP, Cameron wanted to build "Terminator 2" with Schwarzenegger as the protagonist, and all subsequent Terminator movies could not completely leave Schwarzenegger's shadow. Bean played a lot of tough guy roles, but in front of real tough guys, such as Mel Gibson, Stallone, and Bean had a distinct sense of femininity.
Even the well-received good temper has become a burden on Bean's image to a certain extent. Take Fang Kimmer at the time, he was the notorious bad boy in Hollywood, with a poor personality and a love of playing music. When filming Tombstone Town, he didn't talk to people and looked down on people. Bean said, "People ask me what it's like to shoot with Fang Kimmer. I do not know. I haven't met him, I haven't shook hands with him, I know Holliday (the character played by Fang Kimmer), but I don't know Fang Kimmer." However, such an image has attracted a lot of film contracts.
4. That's it
Byan's biggest regret is missing Avatar.
In 1998, shortly after Titanic swept the Oscars, he met James Cameron on set at 20th Century Fox. Cameron took him into the office and showed him two scripts, one called Alita and one called Avatar. Cameron rushed to him that as long as the future technology could keep up, the two projects could be completed.
Avatar
Bean said he had always thought he would play the arch-villain of Avatar, Colonel Miles Quaridge.
He waited 9 months only to learn that Cameron had given the role to Steve Lang. He said Cameron later explained to him that because he had let Sigour Weaver star in Avatar, he didn't want to bring Bean in anymore.
Steve Lang in Avatar
Cameron's account of the story is slightly different.
He said he had never decided which role to give Bean, but after setting up Weaver, he did dismiss the idea of having Bean play the first Avatar. However, when asked if he would give The Character of Bean in the Avatar sequel, Cameron was relieved, saying, "It's a good idea to have him play a certain motion-capture character in Avatar 4 or Avatar 5, and I'll think about it, but it's not a promise, but whatever the case, I'm looking forward to working with him again." ”
In this way, Bean basically bid farewell to mainstream Hollywood commercial films, and has been mixed in a variety of low-budget independent films, occasionally appearing in a blockbuster film, which makes the fans of the sharp-eyed nostalgia excited.
Michael Bean thinks he's doing a good job, and he likes it. He said he prefers to spend time with his family than in movies. He doesn't like to travel around making films, he doesn't like to be away from home for a long time, and he doesn't like to be deprived of his private life. He said that if he made a movie of that scale like Bruce Willis, he didn't know how to live an ordinary life, to be with his kids all the time, to take them to school, to play baseball, to be their coach, to be a part of their lives.
Both James Cameron and Bean's agent, Ed Limato, believe that Michael Bean is choosing not to become a Hollywood star. Cameron said, "He doesn't like the rules of the game in Hollywood, he doesn't like social things. For him, it was just work. Similarly, the path to becoming a star is unpredictable, and one choice may determine everything. Every time you play a role, the road will be forked, and the road to stardom will pass him, of course, it doesn't matter. So he's done a great job in a lot of movies over the years because of some iconic characters he's loved and respected by a lot of people. Who will forget Johnny Ringo in Tombstone Town? ”
Michael Bean said, "People ask me, what is your greatest achievement? It wasn't that I did Terminator, it was that I met Jim Cameron. ”
This article is compiled from Mia Galuppo's article "Everything Had to Go Right": What Happened to 'Terminator' Star Michael Biehn