MICHAEL BIEHN
HE’S GONE TOE-TO-TOE WITH TERMINATORS, ALIENS, ZOMBIES AND ED HARRIS, CREATING SOME OF CINEMA’S COOLEST AND MOST SOULFUL HEROES ALONG THE WAY. MICHAEL BIEHN CATCHES UP WITH EMPIRE TO REFLECT ON A CAREER SPENT FACING DOWN DANGER
An audience with the man who took on the Terminator, went toe-to-toe with a bunch of Aliens, and stared into The Abyss until it stared back at him. Our original plan, to run a bunch of snaps of him on vacation and call it Mr Biehn’s Holiday, was cruelly nixed. Some people don’t recognise genius, that’s the problem here.
EEARLIER THIS SUMMER, Michael Biehn addressed the world. “Listen! And understand!” he barked, lowering a striped mask covering his nose and mouth. “That virus is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or shame. And it absolutely will not stop… until we stay at home.” Then he turned away from the camera, ready for a brisk exit. “Kyle Reese — I’m out!”
The 28-second video got uploaded to the Skynet-like digital consciousness that is Twitter, and locked-down movie fans everywhere exploded with excitement. “JOIN THE RESISTANCE!” posted one. “He still has his fastball,” said another. Someone even synced up the speech with Biehn’s original version from The Terminator.
Biehn himself, not a social-media user, was surprised by the resulting clamour. “I’m not so good when it comes to the movie-star stuff,” he tells
Empire now. “I’ve never had a publicist. I was just messing around, having fun with my kid or whatever, and something came to me about
The Terminator and the virus. My wife Jennifer said, ‘You should shoot that and put it online.’ I was a little bit reticent, but a lot of my friends and family weren’t really getting the seriousness of social-distancing, so I texted it to all my friends.”
The transmission may or may not have saved lives. But one thing’s for sure: anyone whose feed it popped into would have paid attention. There’s a reason the actor has become the face of the human resistance, a corporal in the United States Colonial Marine Corps, the person you hire when you need somebody to yell at Ed Harris in a prison shower room.
Because when Michael Biehn speaks, you damn well listen.
GIVEN THE FORMIDABLE roster of tough-guy roles he’s racked up over the past four decades, it stands out somewhat that Biehn’s first two movie credits were for feather-light comedies that feature not a single shotgun between them. Grease and Coach were both released in 1978, and in each of them Biehn played a basketball-playing high-schooler. “I’m basically a glorified extra,” he says of the more famous film. “The only time you see me is when Travolta’s trying to impress Olivia Newton-john, and he hits me in the stomach to take the ball away. And one other scene in a classroom where Kenickie brings out a frog and everybody goes crazy. This tracking shot goes by me, looking like I’m 14 years old.”
Originally from Alabama, then a graduate of the University of Arizona, where he studied drama, Biehn was determined to break into movies. He bagged a bigger part in Canadian comedy Hog Wild, stalked Lauren Bacall in The Fan, and got to go to the UK for The Lords Of Discipline, the first of his five collaborations with Bill Paxton. “I really love England,” he says. “I used to love the rhyming slang. The weather’s shit. But my favourite joke about the weather is: ‘What’s the difference between the summer and the winter in England? In the summer, the rain is warmer.’”
Then, in 1984, came the job that changed everything. Although it didn’t look like it at the time. In fact, The Terminator sounded like the kind of cheapjack sci-fi that would haunt him on late-night cable for the rest of his life. The director, James Cameron, had been fired from a movie called Piranha II: The Spawning.
And the attached star, an Austrian named Arnold Schwarzenegger, didn’t inspire much more confidence. “I read the script and thought, ‘This could be really, really bad,’” remembers Biehn. “De Niro and Pacino and Coppola and Spielberg — those were the guys I wanted to work with. I thought, ‘Well, this isn’t stacking up very well.’”
Once the shoot got underway, Biehn barely interacted with Schwarzenegger (“I could be wrong, but I think that shot where he smashes the window and grabs Linda is the only shot in the movie where Arnold and I are in the same frame”), but was quickly won over by Cameron’s virtuosity, heading down to Stan Winston’s studio on his time off to marvel at the cybernetic special effects. On set, his performance as resistance fighter Kyle Reese, sent back from the year 2029 to protect waitress Sarah Connor, was perfectly calibrated — Reese initially as cold and efficient as a T-800, but slowly thawing out as he and Sarah fall in love.
He and Cameron warmed to each other too, so much so that he felt able to do what few have dared: tell the director off. “Jim doesn’t coddle actors,” Biehn laughs. “And one time I just said, ‘Alright, Jim, everybody on the crew knows you can do their job better than them, but you can’t fucking play Kyle Reese, so give me a line reading and let’s fucking move on.’ And that was that.”
His next film would be another Cameron classic, Aliens, but as every USS Sulaco specialist worth their salt knows, Biehn wasn’t in the original cast. Instead he was parachuted in after the shoot had already begun at Pinewood Studios, replacing James Remar in the role of Corporal Hicks. He got the call on a Friday night; by Monday he was on the set, putting on body armour that had already been painted on by Remar (Biehn was unhappy with a red daubing positioned over his heart that he thought resembled a bullseye, but some footage had already been shot of the Marines running, so it had to stay).
“People always say, ‘God, it must have been tough coming in there at the end and everything,'” he says. “Well, Hicks didn’t really have that much dialogue, so I had three months to learn about 20 lines.” Like Reese, Hicks was a soulful sci-fi hero, a leader of men, but Biehn gave him lighter shadings, making him
more upbeat, less tortured. “In The Terminator, Reese never smiled. Except for one time when we’re in the hotel room and he knows he’s gonna get laid. No, I'm kidding. We’re in the hotel room and she throws something to him and he smiles. But in Aliens, Hicks smiles all the time. Jim and Gale [Anne Hurd, producer] liked that I wasn’t playing it as some tough, hardass guy. He’s always smiling, and subservient to [Ripley] too. That was a great role. And I think it’s Cameron’s best film.”
His third collaboration with the director was on 1989’s The Abyss, playing a Navy SEAL named Coffey who goes deep, deep beneath the ocean with an oil-platform crew, getting increasingly jittery and psychopathic as the literal pressure gets to him. The shoot in South Carolina was legendarily rough, and the finished film received patchy reviews. But Biehn is a stand-out, moustached and bug-eyed as the villain, although he maintains the character is a good soldier, cut off from his chain of command. “I loved playing him,” he says. “He was a Navy SEAL, for starters, before anybody even knew what a Navy SEAL was. It’s kind of ironic that his name was Coffey, because I would just drink a lot of coffee on that one. I’d get hopped up as much as I could.”
There would be one more Biehn/cameron team-up, for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But Biehn’s brief return as Reese (as a vision Sarah has in the psychiatric hospital) was snipped out of the film in the cutting room, only appearing in the longer, home-release cuts. The actor admits now to being stung by the experience. “When T2 was such a big success and everything, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little jealous,” he says. “I was even a little hurt at a screening one time, where they had two screens — all the stars of T2 in the first, everybody else in the other one — and they put me in the other one.”
The two men remain friends — a while back, Biehn asked Cameron when he’s going to get around to doing a Blu-ray of The Abyss. He’s also kept in touch with Schwarzenegger, the former time-travelling enemies now pals who rib each other. “I saw him about six months ago and he looked fantastic,” Biehn says. “Joking around, I asked him who his plastic surgeon was. He laughed.’”
Biehn is funny, frank and chatty — Empire’s phone call with the star clocks in at two hours. But on screen, he’s all too often been cast in roles that have straitjacketed his charisma. Here on the phone, though, there is no filter.
AS THE 1980s turned into the ’90s, Hollywood didn’t quite know what to do with Biehn. And his second portrayal as a Navy SEAL, in, well, Navy SEALS, was an experience that still causes him pain: the 1990 thriller quickly went
off the rails.
“It was the most horrendous shoot I’ve ever been on in my life,” says Biehn, mincing zero words. “Fucking horrible. Fucking horrible. They offered me a lot of money and Charlie Sheen was on it. We had [Bill] Paxton, we had Dennis Haysbert, we had Joanne Whalley-kilmer. We had aircraft carriers; the Navy was behind it. I mean, we had everything going for us on that movie except for a director that wasn’t smart enough to get out of the way, but just kept injecting nonsense and nonsense and nonsense.”
As Lieutenant James Curran, a SEAL who romances a glamorous journalist, Biehn was, at least, allowed to rework his character’s material, avoiding such silliness as the scene in which Sheen jumps, for no particular reason, off a bridge from a moving car. “There’s a scene where I bring Joanne into what we call the kill house,” he recalls, “and everybody’s shooting all around her. I wrote that scene. And I wrote all of my stuff. Because the other stuff is just so stupid. It’s half of a good movie — I thought it could have been like
Top Gun.”
He felt particularly pained because by that time he had become close friends with several real SEALS, and felt a duty to represent them accurately on screen. “I wanted to show them in the light that they were, not some idiot jumping off a bridge.” So he was pleased to get a chance to right the wrong with 1996’s
The Rock, playing his third and final SEAL, a pro who is gunned down by the renegade soldiers of a mad general (Ed Harris) in the bowels of Alcatraz. Whenever he bumps into Michael Bay, Biehn likes to remind him that he starred in the best scene of Bay’s best film.
When the actor praises something he’s in, you know he’s being honest: Biehn doesn’t do PR fluff. For instance, he’s not particularly proud of the other film he made with Nicolas Cage, directed by Cage’s brother: “It was called something like ‘Timeless’ [actually
Deadfall] and after I saw the rough cut of it, I always referred to it as ‘Pointless’.” But he does have love for
Tombstone, the 1993 Western in which he plays not a cop, a soldier or any kind of leader, but a pistol-twirling, darkhearted outlaw named Johnny Ringo. In a cast stacked with heavyweights — Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott, Charlton Heston — Biehn makes a major impact.
“It took 20 years before people started coming to me with their stories about them bonding with their grandfather or parents, watching
Tombstone together,” he says. “People see it 30 times. When it came out, I couldn’t find anybody who even mentioned me in the reviews. That and
Aliens, those are the ones that get passed down. Guys that were over in Iraq or Afghanistan say those were their go-to movies for throwing dialogue back and forth. ‘Stay frosty’, ‘I’m your huckleberry’, ‘Alright, lunger, let’s do it’… I hear those all the time.”
Not just soldiers, but alpha males of all stripes identify with Biehn’s roster of badasses. “My wheelhouse of people who really love me are military, police officers, district attorneys, those guys,” he says. “This cop once opened up his shirt. Into the Kevlar vest he’d sewn an image of Hicks.”
BEYOND ALL OF the testosterone, Biehn’s fanbase is sizeable and diverse. He has even had small kids run up to him. “I get 12-year-old girls that come up starry-eyed and say, ‘Oh my God, you played Hicks. I love you.’ We made the movie 20 years before their mother and father locked eyes!”
And then there are the film nuts, who pore over his performances, savouring his combination of intensity and vulnerability. Damien Chazelle offered Biehn a role in his new film Babylon, a part which the actor turned down for being too slim, figuring he could end up being cut like he was from Terminator 2. Robert Rodriguez put him in Planet Terror, as a Bbq-loving sheriff. And Neill Blomkamp first offered him a role in Chappie (which was then retracted and given to Sigourney Weaver), before writing him into a new Alien screenplay that would reunite Hicks and Ripley, despite the fact Alien3 killed off the Marine off-screen.
That project, unfortunately, got blasted
out of the Hollywood airlock. Biehn remains sanguine. “I was pretty excited about it at the time,” he says. “It just felt right. But there have been a lot of disappointments in my career. And there have been a lot of lucky things, like what happened to me on Aliens. So easy come, easy go. It’s the way it is.” Like Hicks, who has the ability to close his eyes on a plummeting dropship and have a precombat nap, the actor seems happy enough to go with the flow, dedicating his time of late to writing (he’s collaborated on a piece denouncing Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of actors, and another on Tombstone, which can be read online). “There’s a lot of guys around who just keep at it and keep at it. And I don’t know, I kind of like not working,” he shrugs.
“I go by a set now and kind of shudder, like, ‘Thank God I don’t have to do that anymore.’”
Even so, he’s kept himself busy, directing two films (2010’s The Blood Bond and 2011’s The Victim), reuniting with Val Kilmer in Streets Of Blood, and even playing the President in the incredibly titled Megiddo: The Omega Code 2. A surprise phone call, like that Friday-night one summoning him to Pinewood long ago, can come at any moment. And although Biehn himself won’t confirm or comment on it, multiple reports indicate he’ll soon be back on our screens in The Mandalorian Season 2. If so, you can be sure that when he speaks, Baby Yoda is going to listen up.