Actor-Inspired Element: Joe Morton drew on having suffered a collapsed lung a couple years before to create Dyson's painfully realistic hyperventilating.
Awesome, Dear Boy: Linda Hamilton got a brief outline of the plot from James Cameron, and turned down another movie at once to be able to star in this one.
The T-1000 has never said "Have you seen this boy?" in the film. It's actually quoted from his cameo appearance in Wayne's World.
The T-800 also never said "I'll be back" before sinking into the lava and giving the Connors a thumbs up. The line was instead uttered during the raid on Cyberdyne and the police arriving ("Stay here. I'll be back.") where it temporarily disabled the police officers by Knee Capping them.
Blooper: Look veryclosely on the left-hand side of the screen after the SWAT team officer says "Okay, drop him!" during the Cyberdyne break-in and a random crew member is visible through one of the lobby windows.
The Cast Showoff: Reportedly, Sarah using a shotgun one-handed was inserted because Linda Hamilton's pre-film training regimen had made her strong enough to work a pump-action with one hand.
Cast the Expert: According to the commentary, all but one of the SWAT officers who respond to the Cyberdyne raid were actual SWAT officers in real life.
Channel Hop: It already started going from Hemdale and Orion to Carolco Pictures and Tristar Pictures. In the field of home video, Carolco's frequent partner Live Entertainment put out the VHS, Laserdisc and first DVD release, while in international territories Columbia Tristar Home Video handled the release; currently Studiocanal, who bought the Carolco library after its bankruptcy, have licensed the film to different distributors in the US (first Artisan {a renamed Live}, and then Lionsgate) and internationally (Universal).
Edward Furlong was approached by casting agent Mali Finn at a boys and girls' club.
Robert Patrick was also relatively unknown, with only a few B-movies and a minor role in Die Hard 2 prior to this. He was cast as the T-1000 with the advantage of being unknown to the public, contributing to the surprise of the terrifying nature of his character.
An odd case. Edward Furlong was 13. The early scene when the T-1000 is searching the police database shows that John Connor is 10, but then Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines says he was 13 even if it's a massive Continuity Snarl. What's more is that Edward visibly aged over the course of the long production - looking much younger in the desert for instance than in other scenes. His voice had to be pitched to one level in editing, as it broke during filming.
A straighter example with the young man in the arcade who shows the T-1000 where John is. According to Word of God on the commentary, he was a production assistant who looked about 14, but was nearly 30.
Michael Biehn was supposed to return as Kyle Reese in one of Sarah's dreams. His scene was cut from the theatrical version but restored in the extended cut.
The Dysons originally had two children but the only scene with their daughter was cut from the theatrical version, and one of Tarissa's lines mentioning her was redubbed to remove the reference. The extended cut restores her scene.
Deleted Scene: Scenes filmed but not included in DVD or Special Edition releases:
After a resistance soldier destroys an endoskeleton, another soldier enters into view and picks up the plasma rifle.
When the T-1000 asks the location of the Galleria, the two girls giggle in disbelief. He replies, "I am kind of new here".
The T-1000 passes the bathroom where Janelle is lying dead in the shower. It searches John's room, touching everything gently with his fingertips. It touches a Public Enemy poster, rips it off the wall and finds a box with "Letters from Mom" written on it. It goes through a bunch of photos in the box.
After the Terminator injures the gatehouse guard, John says "Sorry" to that poor bloke.
The nurse asks the T-1000 (as Lewis) what he is carrying. He replies, "Just some trash." before dragging the real Lewis' body into the closet.
When the T-1000 arrives at Sarah's cell, Douglas, the guard whom Sarah beat up, is screaming for his release. The T-1000 ignores him, and changes back to his default form.
During the escape from the asylum, Sarah asks the Terminator whether the T-1000 can be destroyed. The Terminator answers that this is unknown (this shot was in the trailer).
Dueling Dubs: The film has two dubs in Brazil and three in Japan.
Linda Hamilton was on a strict training regimen throughout pre-production and filming - learning judo, weight training, and military techniques. She also maintained a non-fat diet and lost twelve pounds while filming. This is one of the reasons she didn't want to come back for the third film.
Robert Patrick also took on a rigorous running regime in order to be able to run at speed without showing fatigue, only breathing through his nose so that he could keep his face still and robotic even at top speed. He was so fast by the time they were filming that in the first take of him running after John's dirt bike, he actually caught up to the bike, impressing James Cameron even though it meant the shot was now worthless. Less strenuously, Patrick also trained himself to not blink or even flinch at all while firing a gun, since obviously a robot wouldn't. He also learned to fire a gun with either hand, reasoning that a robot would not be limited by a dominant hand. At least one scene shows the T-1000 firing a full magazine with his left hand.
When Sarah is bludgeoning the nurse who assaulted her with a broomstick, that's Linda Hamilton really whacking the actor. Apparently, he was pretty hesitant to hit Hamilton with a nightstick in a prior scene, which caused a lot of takes of a physically demanding sequence for Hamilton (one that didn't even make the theatrical cut and resulted in her falling hard on her knees on a hard floor many times), and she took out some frustration in return.
Reportedly, Hamilton learned to pick locks so she could do it for real when escaping the mental hospital.
Fake Nationality: Enrique Salceda, the Old Friend of Sarah Connor who guarded her weapons cache in her absence, is Guatemalan. The actor, Cástulo Guerra, hails from Argentina.
Focus Group Ending: The original ending had a Distant Finale coda showing Judgment Day had been prevented. Even if the producers had disapproved it, James Cameron only decided to cut it once test audiences reacted badly as well, instead finishing on a more open ending that also didn't have a vastly different tone from the rest of the movie.
Follow the Leader: The huge success of the film led to many shoutouts, parodies, and imitations in America and other countries across the world.
Japan was pretty big in expressing its love for Terminator 2. One of the most obvious parodies that was created there is called "Takaminator" which is a comedy reenactment of the film in a nutshell.
Robot is largely seen by the west as "Indian Terminator".
Inspiration for the Work: In a 2021 interview, James Cameron stated that the decision to focus the film on the ten-year-old John Connor was inspired by the 1985 Sting song "Russians", in which Sting pleads against nuclear war on the grounds that the people who will suffer most are innocent families and especially their children.
"I remember sitting there once, high on E, writing notes for Terminator, and I was struck by Sting's song, that 'I hope the Russians love their children too.' And I thought, 'You know what? The idea of a nuclear war is just so antithetical to life itself.' That’s where the kid came from."
Licensed Game: The Other Wiki lists eight different games released under the Terminator 2 title, including a chess game and a video slot machine game.
The scene where hospital security guard Lewis dies at the T-1000's hands features twins Don and Dan Stanton; Don is the real guard and Dan is the T-1000 mimicking him.
There is a shot where the T-1000 disguises itself as Sarah to try and kill John. Linda Hamilton's twin sister, Leslie Hamilton-Gearren, plays the role of the T-1000 in the scene. The filmmakers were not aware until production commenced that Hamilton had a twin; the original plans called for complex camera tricks and film editing to achieve the same result. Leslie also plays the "motherly" version of Sarah from her playground nightmare.
Gearren is also used in a Deleted Scene, restored in the extended cut, that appears to show the Terminator in a mirror while Hamilton is working on the inside of his head. This was actually a clever set piece, done entirely without camera effects, through the use of an empty mirror frame, the Hamilton twins (Leslie operating on the Terminator and Linda copying Leslie's moves), and a Schwarzenegger dummy with an open robotic skull (with Leslie operating on the dummy while Linda mirrors the movements with the real Schwarzenegger).
Method Acting: Robert Patrick would keep his T-1000 air on at his home to practice, to the amusement of both himself and his wife.
Old Shame: Humberto Vélez, who voiced the T-800 in the Latin Spanish dub, stated in interviews that he was miscast as Arnold Schwarzenegger, who sounds nothing like him. He was practically forced to take the role, and did not like the end result at all.
Linda Hamilton suffered permanent hearing damage in one ear during filming when she fired a gun inside an elevator without using her ear plugs. She also injured her knees from falling on the ground during multiple re-shoots of her being hit with a nightstick by actor Ken Gibbel. Frustrated by Gibbel's refusal to hit her properly, she legitimately knocked him out with a broom handle during the escape scene.
Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly broke some fingers while twirling his shotgun with one hand. While there was a shotgun with a lever loop lengthened to fit his hand, he mistakenly picked up a standard-sized unit and injured his hand while attempting the stunt.
Orphaned Reference: Scenes of the T-1000's shapeshifting malfunctions before release. Only one was left in, after he neutralizes the Terminator and a single ripple of silver runs up his body, which confused audiences until the Director's Cut was released and explained what was going on.
The French dubbing actor of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the first film, Pascal Renwick (who dubbed most of Arnold's roles in The '80s), was replaced by Daniel Beretta, who has dubbed Arnold in virtually everything since Red Heat with no sign of stopping.
Véronique Augereau replaced Élisabeth Wiener for the voice of Sarah Connor in the French dub.
The minigun is the same one that appears in Predator, albeit with a chainsaw-type foregrip instead of the M60-style one in that film.
Sarah's handgun, a Detonics Combat Master with a barrel extension to give it the appearance of a long-slide 1911, was originally built for Runaway - a film which the original The Terminatorcompeted against.
Linda Hamilton's then 20-month-old son, Dalton, plays an infant John Connor in a playground dream sequence. And the "motherly" Sarah in that scene is portrayed by Leslie Hamilton-Gearren, so young Dalton is with his aunt Leslie.
Recycled Script: The film follows a lot of the same beats as the first.
Refitted for Sequel: The Cyberdyne plot, the idea of a terminator blending in with the populace, and the two terminators with one being liquid metal and the other being an older model were meant for the first film.
Schedule Slip: The film's DVD debut was originally scheduled for August 26, 1997 (read: Judgment Day) but for some reason (perhaps relating to technical limitations with the then-fledgling DVD format; it was, after all, the first dual-layer disc on the market) got delayed to October 21.
Shoot the Money: Judging from the opening, the film intended to keep the presence of the T-1000 ambiguous for a while (letting the audience think that Robert Patrick's character was another human sent back to stop another T-800). The trailers, of course, ignored that to show off the then-new and awesome morphing effects.
Spared by the Cut: In the script, storyboards and novelization, Enrique Salceda and his entire family were killed by the T-1000 after it came to their ranch looking for the Connors. This scene was cut from the final version of the film.
The T-800 saying "I need a vacation..." was ad-libbed by Arnold, but James Cameron found it so funny he left it in. It gets nicely explained in-universe by his increasing adaptation to human phraseology.
In addition, Sarah Connor knocking out the orderly Douglas with a broom, as well as the resulting injury, was indeed real. She, or rather, Linda Hamilton, did it out of revenge because in an earlier scene the orderly went a bit too easy on her during the acting.note In a scene from the Extended Edition where the two orderlies force Sarah to take her pills, the actor portraying Douglas refused to hit a woman too hard, forcing them to do several takes, and Linda Hamilton to repeatedly fall on her knees on the hard floor, bruising them up. They kept it in for the final cut (no pun intended).
Robert Patrick had been undergoing weapons training in preparation. In the scenes where the two Terminators shoot each other in the Galleria mall, Cameron was so impressed with his performance that he left the footage in unedited - without speeding up the frame rate.
The T-1000 piloting the helicopter under the overpass was a real stunt performed by the stunt pilot, who insisted on doing it to Cameron. Nobody wanted to be around to film it due to how insanely dangerous it was, so Cameron and an equally brave driver took the cameras to do it themselves. By the way, the pilot did the stunt twice since they needed a shot from behind the helicopter and another in front of it. If it weren't for the stunt pilot's courageousness, the stunt wouldn't have been in the movie at all.
Written-In Infirmity: The T-1000's damage from the liquid nitrogen (hinted in the theatrical cut but made clear in the special edition) was due to Robert Patrick having injured his leg. A limp he had from an injury he sustained when he was younger was also incorporated into the T-1000's CGI walk cycle upon reviewing the footage during post-production.
In early revisions of Junk Yard, "Payback Time" was incorporated through the Time Machine mode.
Finishing multiball without getting a jackpot in Red & Ted's Road Show prompts Red to say "You missed everything!"
Trivia for the SNES video game:
Creator Killer: This game's shoddy quality and laughable controls and animation was the last game to finish LJN's path to becoming the most notorious and hated publisher of the 8 & 16 bit console eras. Their owner Acclaim, who also had a bad rep, took the hint and terminated the brand with prejudice, only reviving it for one game in 2000.
Auteur License: When the developers were first approached to make the arcade game, at first they were only given a quick temporary and supervised access to an early draft of the script to make the game, until they got a chance to meet with James Cameron to pitch him their ideas, Cameron liked them so much that he gave them full access to the production, including the prop assets and the actorsnote Except Arnold Schwarzenegger for which they had to settle with his stunt double for capturing the T-800 infiltration units.
Uncredited Role: Despite her performance being captured and digitalized for the game, and her face appearing in the cabinet, Linda Hamilton refused to appear in the credits of the game.
is used for the climax, dressed up as if it was still in use.