We didn't just interview the original Terminator while in L.A., we also sat down with the latest model, the Rev-9, aka Gabriel Luna! He seems very excited and happy to be the new "bad" Terminator, so we asked him some about the filming, and his resulting friendship with our hero Arnold.
TAFs: We want to congratulate you for such a fantastic performance as the villain of Dark Fate.
Gabriel Luna: Thank you!
You and Arnold have become rather close since you met- you smoke cigars together, working out, and more. What do you think of the bromance between you two?
Of course, I’ve loved him my entire life. He’s a historical figure a great man, one that everyone knows across the world, one that people will not forget for hundreds of years, maybe never. He’s an immortal legend. I wanted him to be proud of the physique that he saw, so I worked very very hard to build up my body and strengthen my mind so when we got there, he would see me and he would believe me as somebody who could stand there toe to toe with him. We’d just go at each other. I was an athlete growing up, and he was an athlete, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we started to connect— we spent so much time in the gym and he saw how hard I worked, cause man I was doing everything I could to make him proud, you know?
I think really after we finished the movie was when we started to grow our relationship, he started to ask me to join him at charity events. He’s been handing out turkeys for the last 27 years in East LA in Boyle Heights and Hollenbeck Park and he’s also been giving out presents and stuff. And I just thought, he asked me and I was so honored that he would ask me to come join him. I think that was the beginning of it, when we really started to connect. Then we went to the Arnold Classic together- first I went to one of the Arnold Classics here at Santa Monica pier, and I got to sit with him and Lou Ferrigno and Franco Columbu, God rest his soul. We just, sitting here with all these amazing legends, the Hulk and two Mr. Olympias, you know? The Mountain was there and all those guys, Brian Shaw and all the big strongmen. That was a great experience. So experience after experience he kept inviting me- to his Christmas party, to his birthday, I was like “Holy moly, I think me and Arnold are friends!” It wasn’t until an interview I heard him actually say, “Gabriel is a great friend.” It’s not always you make movies and you keep the people you work with, but in this case he considered me a friend and that’s the first time I heard it from his mouth.
I’m sure it was a lot of fun on the set of Terminator: Dark Fate, but there were probably a lot of funny bloopers, what funny mistakes did you do or say on the set that might go to the blu-ray?
You know there’s a lot of behind the scenes footage of me neck-slicing everyone or we’re all neck-slicing each other. There’s a really great blooper reel of us all trying to terminate each other.
The prison scene was incredible.
That was nuts, and that was also a very difficult scene to do just because even though it was a movie set, you still had all these beautiful brown-skinned people, dark hair, like me, in cages, which is the reality of our world right now: children and women in cages for no other reason than they just wanted to try to get here and have a better life. That was a very tough day. Not many bloopers that day. This neck slice game will be a lot of fun to watch if they ever show it, because if you kill them, they gotta lie down on the ground and you get to take a picture like you just slayed the beast, and if they miss they gotta do push-ups, so there was a lot of getting fit and a lot of playing.
How much muscle mass have you gained since you started working out with Arnold and are you planning to get bigger or stay the same?
During the shoot I put on 6 kilos, which is 14 pounds, so I went from 172 to 187 at my biggest and I was just feeling strong and yoked, you know? Since, I haven’t been eating as much because I have to consume so much to grow like that, so since then I’ve lost about half of it, so now I’m sitting at about 180, 181. So I kept some of it. But now I have this amazing catalog of training rituals, exercises, I got 12-20 exercises for every body part, every muscle group, so now I have really elevated my knowledge to of what it is to train and how to train properly thanks to him and thanks tp Jospeh and Ralph and Adam, my trainers.
Thank you very much, Gabriel. We are looking forward to the sequels of this movie!
Go see Terminator: Dark Fate, starting TONIGHT! We'll be back to tell more of our L.A. adventures.
