THE NEW KILLING MACHINE ON THE BLOCK
AS THE REV-9, GABRIEL LUNA HOPES TO HELP RETURN THE TERMINATOR FRANCHISE TO FORMER GLORIES
Gabriel Luna has some pretty big exoskeletons to fill as he steps onto multiplex screens as the fearsome Rev-9, the killing machine from the future who is the main antagonist in Terminator: Dark Fate.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course, exploded to fame as the T-800 in The Terminator (1984), while Robert Patrick played the even-more-formidable T-1000 in Terminator: Judgment Day (1991). Can Luna possibly measure up to those legendary predecessors, whose work cast such a long shadow over the cyborg stars of three subsequent Terminator movies?
“I tried to just work at it day by day and make the discoveries as they came,” Luna said. “And, of course, I honoured what worked [before] and incorporated that into what I was trying to achieve, because Arnold did such a great job of establishing this idea and this dread and this really great villain in the first one, and we all know how Robert really took it to the next level in the second one.
“And I think that we accomplished that, though I will leave it for the audience to decide,” he said. “But I am really proud of the work I put in and the stunt team and everyone involved. I think people are going to really enjoy the Rev-9.”
The new film, now in cinemas, boasts the return of James Cameron, who wrote and directed The Terminator and T2: Judgment Day, but hasn’t been involved in any of the subsequent movies or the television show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-2009). Cameron produced and co-wrote Dark Fate, but left the directing chores to Tim Miller, best known for Deadpool (2016).
Luna, a 36-year-old Texan of Mexican descent, beat out numerous actors to land the role of the Rev-9. He’s best known for the film Transpecos (2016) and such shows as Matador (2014) and Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2016-2017), the latter of which cast him as the fiery anti-hero Robbie Reyes, aka Ghost Rider.
Dark Fate unfolds nearly three decades after the events of Judgment Day, with Skynet dispatching the Rev-9, its latest and most lethal Terminator, back in time to kill Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), human/cyborg hybrid Grace (Mackenzie Davis) and her friends. Enter the one and only Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who enlists the help of an unlikely figure, the T-800 (Schwarzenegger), who these days prefers to be called, of all things, Carl. Together they take the battle to the Rev-9 in an effort to save Dani… and the whole world.
“I can’t say much about the story, but you have a Terminator there with a directive and you have our heroes trying to fend him off,” Luna said, speaking by telephone from Los Angeles. “It’s just this beautiful explosion of action and combat. It’s really exciting. It’s true to the old style, but of course it’s amplified.
“The first two films … they were rides,” he said. “You were in that cop car with Arnold as he’s chasing Sarah Connor down in the first one. You were in the big rig or you were on the bike with Arnold. You were moving with the story. It was important for us to continue in that vein.
“As far as all of the time travel and the physics and the science of it all, it’s just this really brilliant layer on top of everything,” Luna added. “The original film, it was groundbreaking, the whole idea. I think what we’ve done is we’ve gone back to a more linear, really strong, just fast-moving style of filmmaking.”
Combining elements of the T-800 and T-1000, the Rev-9 is a carbon-based,
matte-black robot/machine in a liquid-metal package. What sets it apart from its predecessors is that the Rev-9 can split, delivering double the Terminators for a moviegoer’s money.
Of course the Rev-9 must have an Achilles heel, so that he is not flat-out unstoppable.
Is “he” the right word? What pronoun does Luna prefer for the Rev-9?
“I’m an it,” the actor replied without hesitation.
Playing the character as an “it” meant that Luna needed to lean into the machine’s physicality. Working with Miller, as well as with his trainer and stunt team, Luna worked himself into superior shape and moved as the Rev-9 in ways that were both fluid and robotic. He also worked on betraying no emotion.
“It was a very technical process, in that sense,” Luna said. “You just have to move through the world and knife through it and be as efficient as possible. You’re taking account of everything at once and trying to hold this loose gaze and see peripherally and think like a machine.
“I have no way of recreating that experience in life using this kind of character,” he said. “You can’t. You can go have an experience and bring it to the table, but this was an exercise in what my imagination has built over the 30 or whatever years of existence of the [Terminator] story and this mythology. I tried to bring that all to the table.”
Luna went on to say that Hamilton was “the reason I was going to see this film when I heard it was being made”, and described it as a thrill to get to know her.
As for Schwarzenegger, he was one of Luna’s heroes, the actor said, a man who has “reached the pinnacle of pretty much every realm he has entered”. Luna, who spent a great deal of time working out at the gym with the veteran action star, called
Schwarzenegger supportive, “very, very collaborative” and full of advice.
“One nugget that we shared — that was something I knew in my gut from when I watched the films, and what I knew was effective about his performance — is just the effortless nature of it,” Luna said. “That was something that he imparted to me, and it aligned with what I was already trying to get into, that it’s all effortless… and it should be.
“A Terminator just cuts through the world,” he said. “I appreciated that, and it really helped reinforce the direction in which I was already moving.”
Speaking of direction, Luna is 15 years into a career he never planned to have. His father passed away before Luna’s birth, and his mum — who “ran a strict ship” — encouraged his pursuit of football, basketball and track. He was offered a couple of football scholarships and nearly committed to studying business at the University of Texas.
Then he dislocated his shoulder while playing football.
“I was pivoting, trying to figure out what I wanted to do,” Luna said. “I was in a technical-theatre class, building sets and swinging a hammer, and trying to get my fine-arts credit. Then I was asked by the teacher, Mr. Sharp: ‘We’ve got a play. Do you want to try out for it?’
“I said: ‘I can’t do that,’” he continued. “I made an excuse that I had to go to practice, which was true, or half-true. Even though I was hurt, I was still going to football practice. He seemed disappointed.”
Luna returned home, where he received a telephone call from his grandmother. She told him: “I’ve got a box.” That box turned out to contain items that had belonged to his father, including trophies and a VHS tape.
“We watched it, and it was him in a play that he starred in and wrote for our church eight months before I was born, for Easter,” Luna recalled. “I was overwhelmed because this was the first time I’d ever seen him alive and speaking and moving. Once I digested that moment, I was like, ‘I have to go try this thing Mr. Sharp asked me to do.’ I’d said no because I was afraid, and now, all of a sudden, I wasn’t.
“I tried out, and the scene he gave me was one where a man stands in front of two unmarked graves, asking this old woman which one belongs to his father,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘This is my first acting lesson. Wow, I know what this is. I know what this feels like.’
“To this day, that’s a big element of trying to be successful in this work,” the actor said. “I try to live a full life and to know what things feel like, so I don’t have to be a phoney on the day.
“I got that part in the show,” Luna concluded. “A woman saw it and gave me a scholarship, $75,000, to be an actor and go to St. Edward’s University in Austin. And it all just built from there. I see something on the horizon, set a goal and just keep on, one step at a time, trying to get there.”