Peacemaker Star Robert Patrick Compares Working With James Gunn to Working With James Cameron on T2

Robert Patrick plays Auggie Smith AKA White Dragon AKA Peacemaker’s father on Peacemaker, and his character is a very bad man. In fact, writer and director James Gunn recently talked about why it was “very hard” to write such a horrible character. Of course, this isn’t Patrick’s first time playing a nasty villain. The actor’s most famous role was playing the T-100 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. During a recent interview with Slash Film, Partick talked about working with Gunn on Peacemaker and comapred the director to T2 helmer, James Cameron. 

“Well, I knew that James Cameron was a brilliant man,” Patrick said of his time working on T2. “I think James Gun is a brilliant man, and I think James Cameron is a brilliant man. I think they’re in that class with the Elon Musks of the world in their prospective fields and where they lend their talents – I think they’re groundbreaking artists.”

He added, “I think that I am such a luddite, and I have a hard time with an iPhone, a computer and all this kind of stuff – God bless my wife, if she wasn’t able to help me out with all the stuff that I do, I don’t think I’d be able to do it – but as far as the effects and everything, when I read Terminator 2, I read that script, it took me five hours to read it. I couldn’t comprehend what the f*ck was going on. I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, what? What the f*ck?’”

During the interview, Patrick also explained why playing terrible characters can be easier.

“Yeah, I don’t know, but it’s true. Character acting and finding a character is what we do, and sometimes if you don’t play a character that’s so clearly defined as this, and you have to find shade, it’s a little harder to find nuance and color that you want to give the character – the tone as it were. My good friend, Hal Holbrook, God rest his soul, said he had a harder time playing closer to himself, being himself, than playing Mark Twain because Mark Twain is the character that he embodied and played in his one-night shows and whatnot. He could hide behind the makeup and all this kind of stuff, and that’s the truth. When you’re playing something a little closer to you, it is harder. When you’re playing something farther away from you, thank God in my case a racist, xenophobe, misogynist, that’s about as far removed from me as you can get, and so it’s easier to grab. I know that doesn’t logically make sense, [but] it’s the reality.”

The finale of Peacemaker drops on HBO Max on Thursday.