Who Played The Best John, Sarah, and Kyle in All the Terminator Movies

The year is 1981. A young, starry-eyed, future science fiction master by the name of James Cameron wandered the streets of Rome, filming Piranha II: The Spawning (1981), his first director’s credit. Producer Ovidio Assonitis instructed Cameron to get a close up shot of female lead of Carole Davis. Cameron didn't and Assonitis fired him. But he encouraged him to stay on set to help with the filming. Suddenly, Cameron fell ill with food poisoning, and that night, as he writhes in his hot Roman sheets in a fever James Cameron dreams the strangest of dreams:

An invincible robot assassin from the future steps out of a fire. It has damaged his fake flesh and beneath, Cameron sees the inner mechanics of a cyborg.

A franchise was born, a career was made. Two-thirds of the world has a camera in their phones that the government can use to spy on them and eventually AI can learn to understand our every move. The Terminator franchise has lifted the spirits of anti-tech heads across the seven continents who, despite their inability to change their default gmail font back from Comic Sans and belief the human spirit will always trump the creeping fingers of soulless technology.

Who is the Best Sarah, John, and Kyle Across All the Terminator Films

Let’s not confuse our apples with oranges—most of the installations of Terminator are pretty strong and have made for a great sci-fi franchise. At the center lies one robot and three amazing characters: Sarah Connor, John Connor, and Kyle Reese. John Connor starts the revolution against Cold War A.I. technology called Skynet that has become self-aware, perceived humanity as a threat, and initiated a nuclear holocaust. They also somehow acquired the ability to time-travel. He is on the brink of victory when Skynet sends one Austrian-accented android (a model T-800) back in time to kill his mom, Sarah. The resistance sends Kyle Reese back to protect her. Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor fall in love and conceive John before Kyle dies trying to kill the T-800. Nine months later, John is born.

The Terminator triangle marks a truly unique character trifecta amongst Hollywood narrative and if Freud were alive today, it would make him rethink his whole Oedipus thing on an inter-dimensional level. Amongst this complicated triangle lies much room for creative interpretation and nuance. There have been several different incarnations of this three-person dynamic, and some weird relationships have arisen, like how two Queens from the HBO series Game of Thrones—Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister) and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryan)—played Sarah Connor.

Who Played it Best: Kyle Reese

• Michael Biehn, Terminator (1984)

You saw him drop to the ground naked in the opening scene of the film that started it all. Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese is surly scarred future resistance fighter who has been in love with a picture for years and, needless to say, does not have a girlfriend. Like so many Hollywood heroes and lovers, he makes his entrance into his future partner’s life wearing only a trench coat and creepily following her in the L.A. shadows. When he has Sarah Connor in the car and he’s trying to fill her in about the future, and she bites his arm, that pain is real. “Cyborgs don’t feel pain. I do.”

• Anton Yelchin, Terminator: Salvation (2009)

For his role as young Kyle Reese in Terminator: Salvation (2009), Anton Yelchin carefully studied Biehn’s performance in order to deliver continuity to his role. “Having studied it, it’s very elegantly done,” Yelchin said. “Unless you sit there and study it, you’re not told, like, ‘Oh my God, look at how much is going on.’ The scenes where he’s talking a lot, where maybe it’s him telling [Sarah Connor] her history, really, I watched a lot of that. I watched a lot of that for history, but I watched most of it for how he says it, his particular reactions.” Yelchin’s parents were famous figure skaters in Russia, a background that he probably did not draw from when repeating Reese’s famous line: “Come with me if you want to live.”

• Jai Courtney, Terminator Genisys (2015)

Time for some backstory from the future. Jai Courtney has two predecessors. He’s not going to carry the torch, he’s going to reinvent the stick. Courtney’s Reese doesn’t really know where he’s going, he’s just been in love with a photograph for years. It was destiny, or something, that made him volunteer to go back in time and save his once and future baby mama. Now that he’s in 1984, he struggles to negotiate a foreign world and, even though he’s from Australia, he puts on a killer American accent. Jai Courtney is our true modern male hero: resourceful but often confused and slow on the uptake. Coupled with a more competent female action role, this power combo has been dazzling the fans lately. Seen the last Mad Max? Seen the last Star Wars?

Who Played it Best: John Connor

• Edward Furlong, Terminator 2 (1992)

Starting, however, with the 1991 sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the future messiah was just a naked little baby in a bed of woven rushes floating down the river. Mom is the nuthouse while he gets raised by foster parents. Enter Arnold and another T-1000 unit: they battle, Arnold wins, duh. John gets a new friend as the plot spins into a strange cross between boy-meets-alien, Old Yeller, and Daddy drama.

• Nick Stahl, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

Once starring as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Nick Stahl gave the world John Connor as a young adult making the transition from kid to revolutionary. Mom died from leukemia, but John still has to send his Dad back to hook up with her. Family drama is the least of this John Connor’s worries. He is attacked by a lady T-X cyborg and witnesses the nuclear apocalypse from a bunker.

• Christian Bale, Terminator Salvation (2009)

Everyone’s heard about how Heath Ledger went insane playing the Joker (while employing a cavalier psychiatrist), but few know that Christian Bale also lost his mind playing John Connor. It was on the set of Terminator: Salvation that Christian Bale freaked out at the director of photography and launched a four-minute tirade against this poor man. Christian Bale is an actor who allows his roles to completely subsume him. As a guy who’s dealing with the fate of humanity, he cannot cope with such incompetence as a fidgety director of photography!

• Jason Clarke, Terminator Genisys (2015)

Forced to transform his body into part-cyborg, John Connor is now Skynet’s T-3000. Believing his fate is to join man and machine, he is sent back and continuity gets way messed up. Part-robot, maybe-failed prophet, maybe imaginary/useless given the whole alternate timelines/universes, we’ll give Mr. Clarke a solid ‘meh.’ On a side note, if movie fans accept this alternate timeline scheme that has now been used twice (Terminator Genisys, and X-Men: Days of Future Past), a dangerous precedent will be set in which sequels will be endlessly possible.

Who Played it Best: Sarah Connor

• Linda Hamilton, Terminator 2

With the other Terminator films as perspective, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in the original film seems almost surprising. She is incredibly average—neither hot nor frumpy—and she guides herself through life with careful mistrust of men in trench coats who follow her.

• Emilia Clarke, Terminator Genisys (2015)

Soon after she won the hearts of dragon nerds everywhere playing Daenerys Targaryan in the HBO series Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke played the mother of John Connor himself. In Terminator Genisys, Sarah is a bad ass who knows the ropes and is ready to slay a couple of cyborgs.

In a strange twist, Clarke incorporated parts of both Linda Hamilton’s previous portrayal along with those of Edward Furlong’s performance as John Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Skynet killed Sarah’s parents when she was nine. She was found and raised by the T-800 Model 101 (played by the big man from Austria). This storyline parallels John Connor’s relationship with the T-800 in the first sequel and it truly spins a strange mythical web to this universe in which humans are at odds with the robots that raised them.

• Lena Headey, Sarah Connor Chronicles (2006)

While I have written nothing about the Fox television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles because … well … it’s a bit of an appendix to the overall body. How would it be possible, however, to fail to discuss the role played by Lena Headey, famously Cercei Lannister in Game of Thrones?

The fact that two Queens who also gave birth to fire breathing reptiles/tyrant child kings makes me believe that Hollywood casting directors are literally the most selective people in the industry.

The beloved Terminator franchise does not provide us with guidance when it comes to the strange connections between the stars. It only asks questions to which there are no answers in the present.