How Billy Idol almost became the symbol of a cinematic revolution: “What’s that face telling you?”

Posted On January 20, 2025January 20, 2025

Few singers cut quite as iconic a silhouette as Billy Idol. The man behind ‘White Wedding’ and ‘Rebel Yell’ is just as famous for his long leather coats and spiky blonde hair as he is for any of his songs. His image was a massive part of his success in the 1980s, given, of course, that his videos were regular fixtures on MTV. 

Idol’s memorable visage has also appeared in a few films over the years. He had a small role in Mad Dog Time, featuring Diane Lane, Richard Dreyfuss, and Jeff Goldblum. More notably, he had a memorable cameo in the Adam Sandler film The Wedding Singer as part of a group of passengers on a plane who convinced the main character to go after the girl of his dreams. He also very nearly ended up in one of the most famous films of all time – James Cameron’s action classic, Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

During an interview with Empire, Cameron revealed that Robert Patrick was his only choice for the part of the T-1000, with one notable exception. “The only notion that I entertained seriously, up to and including doing a screen test, which I actually found recently – it actually exists – was Billy Idol,” he said. “I was fascinated by Billy Idol’s physical look. I remembered the lesson of Arnold, and the lesson of Arnold is, ‘What’s that face telling you?’ He had a kind of sneering, sinister quality. It was a bit stylised, but in the right context, with the right direction and the right lighting, this could be interesting.”

Unfortunately, fate had other ideas for Cameron, Idol, and the project. In 1990, the rock star was on his motorcycle when, after running a red light, he got hit by a car. The accident left him with severe damage to one of his legs, which was very nearly amputated. Though his limb was saved, he had lost almost all of his mobility. A planned appearance in Oliver Stone’s upcoming biopic of The Doors was scrapped, as were any plans of him playing the liquid metal assassin.

“He wouldn’t be able to walk without a limp,” Cameron said. “That didn’t work. So then I met Robert [Patrick], and once I met Robert, I really focused on him.”

Had Idol not had his accident and gotten the part, his legacy would be entirely different today. Terminator 2 was the most expensive movie ever made when it was released in 1991, with a large portion of that money going towards its groundbreaking special effects. The T-1000’s ability to transform from solid to liquid was possibly due to the work of legendary VFX artist Dennis Muren, who harnessed the potential of CGI to create something audiences had never seen before.

“I was following what we were doing with the CGI group, and I did the ‘Young Sherlock Holmes’ show a few years before just to see what it was like, but I never really understood it,” Muren explained to Tech Radar. “So I took a year off work and got a massive textbook, about 1,800 pages long, and I sat in the local coffee shop here in California, and I read it.”

The end result of Muren’s hard work was a movie that demonstrated the power of computer graphics over traditional visual effects. Without the success of Terminator 2, the movie industry as we know it would look a whole lot different.

If Idol hadn’t run that red light, he would have become the face that changed cinema forever. He is still a legend in his own right, with plenty of memorable contributions to culture to look back on, but this has got to sting every single time he’s reminded of it.

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