Glau Is Advanced In Connor

Summer Glau, who plays a mysterious classmate in Fox's upcoming Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, offered SCI FI Wire a few spoilers about her character, who is more advanced than she appears. (Don't read ahead if you don't want to be spoiled for the pilot!)

Glau plays Cameron, a new model of cybernetic organism, who has come back from the future to protect John Connor (Thomas Dekker) and his mother, Sarah (Lena Headey). And she's an improvement on Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg from the Terminator movies, on which the show is based. For one thing, her character--named in homage to franchise creator James Cameron--can mimic human behavior.

"[Creator Josh Friedman's] concept is that I'm the most advanced Terminator yet, but the way I'm advanced is in my ability to almost be human," Glau said at a fan preview of the show in Los Angeles last weekend. "And there's still this fine line. You almost wonder in certain scenes, like, ... is she feeling something? I can't really put my finger on it, but it's like she's actually feeling something. And I want that to come across. But I also want people to be startled sometimes when she is absolutely a robot."

Glau, a former ballet dancer who played the warrior waif River in Serenity, added that her dance training helped in the action sequences.

"Absolutely it's helped me," Glau said. "I would say that my ballet training helped more in Serenity, because I was doing martial arts," she said, adding: "Dancing always helps, because I learn all my fight scenes like choreography, so I learn them by counts. And when you're working with a stunt guy who's twice as big as you, and you need to anticipate every swing he's going to take at you and every punch, it's important that you know exactly the timing that it's all going to play out."

Glau and stunt coordinator Joel Kramer, who also worked on the films, talked about what it is like to do fight scenes as a Terminator. Unlike the graceful River, Glau's Cameron just smashes things, Glau said. "It's completely different, because when I was playing River, I was supposed to be a small girl, just a human girl, and so I had to learn finesse, and I had to learn how to use my body weight," she said. "But when you're a Terminator, you just break things and throw things and drive over people and use bombs and use guns."

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles debuts on the Fox broadcasting network over two nights, Jan. 13 at 8 p.m. ET/PT and Jan. 14 at 9 p.m., before moving to its regular timeslot, Mondays at 8 p.m.

I watched Sunday's show tonight, I was very happy with that first hour!! - Marc