Lena Headey in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Apparently critics and fans alike are up in arms about the new television Terminator spin-off, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Apparently British actor Lena Headey has been criticised for being too thin for an action hero.
As with many things, it's difficult to find evidence of widespread discontent - though easy to find a small, very vocal, minority getting very unhappy indeed. Such is the way of the internet. Certainly, at least one fan site, the Sarah Connor Charm School, are not big fans of the casting, to say the very least. Being interested, as they are as a group, in Linda Hamilton's more musclular kind of actionwoman, they find Lena Headey to be disappointingly limp and frail-looking.
But then, do action heroes always have to have the rippling muscles of Arnie to prove that they're up to the job? Well, on a purely practical level, they need to be quite tough, but as many athletes prove, you don't have to be musclebound to be strong. Besides, to make up for what she lacks in physicality, the programme-makers will undoubtedly do what they'd do with a puny male star: just give her a bigger gun.
The overwhelming feeling from TV blogs seems not to be a great disapproval so much as a deafening ambivalence. "Lena Headey is fine as Sarah, but no more [than that]", as South Dakota Dark put it.
(in.neu)tral was mildly unimpressed with the pilot, and while there was confusion over elements of her character ("if she wasn't strikingly young and attractive enough [already], Sarah inexplicably appeared in a miniskirt in her own dream. Classy"), their attention was obviously piqued enough to come back for seconds. And that seems to be quite indicative of general opinion. Some people have compared Lena unfavourably to Linda, but at the end of it all, and in the words of showbiz blog Hecklerspray, at least people didn't completely hate it.
Mark Perigard described her in the Boston Herald as a "twig of an action hero", while others called her "strong" and filled with an "angry intensity", dazzled by her "unnatural beauty". Whereas others still were far more interested in the fact that Sarah Connor's back, but this time she's naked. Generally, people seemed to feel positively about the show, and about Lena: "Lena Headey is no Linda Hamilton, but she doesn't have to be. She gives the Sarah Connor character her own twist and so far, she's really doing a good job."
So is it a problem that she's thinner than the average arsekicking heroine? Alan Sepinwall in the New Jersey Star Ledger makes perhaps the best argument against the new Sarah Connor, in context:
"In the TV series, she's played by Lena Headey ('300'), who lacks both the muscles and intensity. One or the other might be forgivable, but not both. Sarah's held up as a classic action heroine worthy of a spin-off 17 years down the road because of the transformation she puts herself through after the first movie. Essentially, she turns herself into a Terminator, or the closest thing possible within the limits of biology. She's strong, and she's nuts, and she will kill you if she thinks you're remotely a threat to John."
[More of Alan's thoughts and comments here]
Basically, it doesn't matter so much if she looks like she might just physically snap at any minute as long as you get the feeling she might mentally snap instead. Is that right?
So it's not about whether a thin woman is more or less capable of playing an action hero than a beefier one, and it's not about whether it's unfeminist to suggest that Headey's body shape might hinder her ability to fight for survival, or even just beat up robots. It's just about whether this particular actress has the skill to take on the mantle of a character still thought of by many as a role model for strong women characters in the genre - or just in general - and remembered fondly by critics and fans alike. And the internet says ... "Meh. Maybe."
