'Terminator 5': Arnold Scwarzenegger Details Terminator Aging, Hints At Various Incarnations

Arnold Schwarzenegger is returning to the dire future of 2029 in which Skynet and its robotic Terminator assassins have dominated humanity. In Terminator 5 Schwarzenegger will once again play a killer robot that looks like a man. In two interviews, the actor gives up some new details about how Terminator 5 will work. There's one attention-getting bit about how the Terminator's flesh suit ages, but some more intriguing bits that suggest we'll see several versions of Arnold's character throughout the story.

Arnold was on the Nerdist podcast, and he tells a lot of great stories. Just before he talked about Terminator 5, for example, there's a great explanation of how Twins came to be, and how Schwarzenegger made more money on that one than on anything else he'd done so far.

The Terminator 5 talk begins at around the 46-minute mark, with discussions of working out leading to a couple minor revelations about the new film:

The director wants me to be exactly the same as I was in 1984. Because the person — I have human flesh, underneath is a metal skeleton — but the human flesh ages just like everyone else does. The skeleton doesn't change. So it has to be the same body, physically the same thing, even though you may have show a little grey and all those things... So it's very important that now I step it up with the workout.

I [need to] gain an extra 5-7 pounds of pure muscle and get that body back that I had then so we can switch from Terminator to the character I play now, kind of a Terminator-protector character, so we can switch back and forth to a 25-year old versus a 35-year old versus a 55-year old, when it's in the future of 2029. So all of this and then play around with it, the body will stay the same but the makeup will change and the hair will change.

In the second paragraph there Schwarzenegger's comments are a bit difficult to follow, as he's starting to ramble a bit, and sadly there's no follow-up  to get more details.

In addition, Schwarzenegger gave an interview to MTV where he echoed and in some cases clarified these same points:

The way that the character is written, it's a machine underneath. It's this metal skeleton. But above that is human flesh. And the Terminator's flesh ages, just like any other human being's flesh. Maybe not as fast. But it definitely ages... Terminator deals a lot with time travel, so there will be a younger T-800, and then what that model does later on when it gets reprogrammed, and who gets ahold of him. So it will be all kinds of interesting twists in the movie, but I feel so good.

Here's the MTV video interview: