T
episode “San Junipero,” in which Davis
and Gugu Mbatha-Raw played digital
avatars falling in love in a spare near
future. And before even that was Davis’s
turn as brilliant punk programmer Cam-
eron Howe in AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire.
The series took place in the 1980s but
commented on our current era of tech
overlords while steeped in new wave
hacker paranoia.
So the future-but-past has been
where Davis thrives. She acknowledges
the trend, though she says it seems far-
fetched that casting directors would
think of her while wondering to them-
selves who might fit that particularly
narrow yet vague rubric.
“It looks like I have a real focus and
interest in the ’80s, and I imagine that if I
unpacked the political ideas and cultural
shifts that were going on, maybe that’s
true, there’s a reason why I’m attracted to
that,” she says. “But I mean—who doesn’t
want to be in Blade Runner?”
Whatever the case, it is a niche with
staying power in today’s Hollywood,
where intellectual property from the ’80s
still holds sway. Davis, a millennial, was
born in the back half of the decade. But
Hollywood keeps sending her back (or
forward, to dark visions of the future as
originally seen from the 1980s) anyway—
and frequently, insistently, as a sensitive,
vulnerable, defiant oracle, truth telling
to the other characters, the audience, or
anyone else who will listen.
Watching her in person and on-screen,
it’s not hard to see why. Slim, tall, and—
especially when her hair’s cut short—a
little androgynous, Davis looks like the
future—especially in contrast to the poly-
ester and poofy hair of the ’80s. When
she’s impassioned, conviction radiates
from her, even as her wide eyes offer
windows into her fears. She often looks
like a woman who has seen too much,
and her face is struggling to hold it all in,
but something drives her to keep going
too. If Davis showed up on your doorstep
one day, holding a weapon and talking
about Judgment Day, you’d believe her.
Terminator: Dark Fate seeks to revive
the franchise that began in 1984 with James
Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd’s apocalyptic
romance The Terminator, a seminal piece
of ’80s action that Cameron conjured
after a vision of a metal skeleton wreathed
in flames came to him during a literal fever
dream. The series peaked in 1991 with the
R-rated megahit Terminator 2: Judgment
Day and then fell off into a strange twilight
of spin-offs and timelines, culminating
in 2015’s ill-liked Terminator: Genisys. In
2017, Cameron retook creative control of
the franchise as writer and producer.
Directed by Tim Miller, Dark Fate
reunites Cameron, Arnold Schwarzeneg-
ger, and Linda Hamilton for a film that is
in the same timeline as the original two—
except only kind of, because at the end
of Terminator 2, Hamilton’s Sarah Con-
nor changed the future. The movie calls
back to the potent core of the Terminator
universe: humanity’s fight to survive
and the devastating technology that
aims to annihilate it. The franchise has
always pulsed with blood-and-chrome
machismo, but the story’s heart is a goo-
ey, time-traveling romance. In a return
to the series’ feminist roots, Dark Fate’s
humans are all women, and Grace is
the first to be sent back in time in Termi-
nator history. She’s there to save a new
character named Dani Ramos, played
by Natalia Reyes. In the trailer’s big fist-
pump moment, Connor shows up, guns
blazing, to rescue them from the new two-
bodied Rev-9, played by Gabriel Luna.
“There were beautiful times shooting it
where I was like, ‘Is this an Andrea Arnold
movie?’ ” Davis says. “This really American
Honey–esque road movie of these three
women traveling across great distances
and learning about each other. I know that’s
not the pitch I’m supposed to use for Te r m i -
nator, but it’s what really appealed to me—
and what’s so special about the first two.”
Grace is efficient, Davis says, laugh-
ing. “Focused. She’s not, like, the comic
relief.” Though she’s been enhanced,
she’s completely human, Davis says: “I’m
sure everyone’s going to love this analogy,
but her cybernetic alterations—it’s like
having a boob job or something.”
This is Davis’s first foray into action,
and she was unaccustomed to the training
and physical toll of a day on set. Acting in
short bursts—“You’re just running some-
where and shouting a line”—threw off her
sense of when a scene was working. She
has a newfound appreciation for action
heroes. “Bruce Willis is a genius,” she says.
As a child, Davis liked theater for the
attention—and the intimacy of a small
group that sometimes got free pizza after
school. Her parents, Lotte and John—
who founded a hair-care company out
of their basement a couple of years after
she was born—supported her dream to
act, insisting only that she get a college
education first. (“I’ve had a very easy
road,” Davis says.) As she grew as a per-
former, her focus shifted inward. “In a
very selfish way,” Davis says. “I just really
like feeling emotion.”
There were a few longer scenes in Te r -
minator: Dark Fate, and Davis spent the
shoot anticipating them: “Oh my God,
we’re going to talk in a hotel room all day
long, I cannot wait.”
The Terminator movies are always
trying to outrun human history—human
innovation, in the form of artificial intel-
ligence, robotics, and Skynet. And it hasn’t
escaped Davis that 2019 is just a decade
before the franchise’s post-apocalyptic
future, where beleaguered humans battle
robots in a smoking nuclear wasteland.
“We keep exploring the same themes
over, and over, and over again, endlessly,”
Davis says. She loves science fiction, espe-
cially now that she’s worked so much in
the genre. But she wishes people engaged
with its ideas a little more.
“It’s so presumptuous and stupid that
I want people to view movies as real cau-
tionary tales,” Davis adds. “But it is weird
that we get so much entertainment out of
these near-future disaster movies—and
then don’t learn anything.”
She’s cynical about humanity’s abil-
ity to change, but she sees an upside to
it too. As a woman in the film industry,
she’s made to constantly worry about her
shelf life. We talk about other women in
entertainment—like Hamilton (“such a
queen,” Davis says), who made headlines
at Comic-Con for refusing to say some of
Sarah Connor’s scripted lines in Dark Fate,
and Judi Dench, who this spring told an
interviewer, “I take every job because I fear
it will be my last.” Davis has been mulling
over what comes next for her, wondering
if she needs to strike while the iron is hot.
Then she gets some perspective.
“What does it matter?” she says. “The
world is going to end in like 50 fucking
years! Why don’t you just go have fun, and
don’t worry about ‘doing this correctly’?”
Davis has wound herself up again,
and for a moment she’s Grace, telling
the present something it does not really
want to hear, stricken by knowledge that
is almost too difficult to bear. And then
she settles down, and the future girl slips
behind her façade, where she looks and
acts just like everyone else.
“But I do care,” she finishes, simply.
“I don’t know how to not care.”
104 VANITY FAIR OCTOBER 2019
HAIR BY WARD; MAKEUP BY ROMY SOLEIMANI; MANICURE BY CASEY HERMAN; PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY PRODN; FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS
