Emilia Clarke Confirmed as Sarah Connor in TERMINATOR: GENESIS


There's another storm coming in.  And appropriately enough, it's the woman called Stormborn.

Deadline has officially confirmed that Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke will be playing the coveted role of Sarah Connor in Paramount Pictures' Terminator reboot Terminator: Genesis, directed by Game of Thrones' Alan Taylor.  Clarke will be joined by Jason Clarke (no relation) as the adult version of her son John Connor and presumably, the original Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a currently undisclosed role.

In the original movie, Sarah Connor was a young Los Angeles college student and waitress who is relentlessly pursued by an android known as a Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 Model 101 Terminator that traveled through time from the future.  Sarah is rescued by another time-traveller called Kyle Reese, who explains that the future is controlled by an artifical intelligence called Skynet and the T-800 has been sent to kill her before she can give birth to her son John, who becomes the leader of the human resistance against Skynet.

According to the article, the casting was down to Clarke and 21 Jump Street actress Brie Larson, with both of them testing for the producers at David Ellison's Skydance and Megan Ellison's Annapurna.  As fans of HBO's Game of Thrones know well, Clarke has a solid background portraying a formidable leader as the exiled princess Daenerys Targaryen, developing the character over the past three seasons from a young girl intimidated by her brother Viserys, to the Khaleesi of the Dothraki tribe, to the "Mother of Dragons" that freed tens of thousands of slaves.

Clarke is the third actress to portray the character of Sarah Connor, after Linda Hamilton defined the role in the original 1984 film The Terminator and the 1991 sequel Terminator 2: Judgment DayFellow Game of Thrones actress Lena Headey revived the character in the fondly remembered 2008-09 Fox television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which lasted for two seasons.

Terminator: Genesis is currently scheduled to be released in theaters on July 1, 2015.

Posted on December 13, 2013 .