Michael Biehn owes his stint as an '80s action star to James Cameron, who cast him in three of his earliest films. The Nebraska native played Kyle Reese in 1984's The Terminator, Hicks in 1986's Aliens, and Lt. Coffey in 1989's The Abyss, giving him plenty of fans in sci-fi and horror circles. The most iconic of those characters wound up being Kyle Reese, though at the time Biehn had no idea just how big The Terminator would become.
"People talk about it being an iconic movie, with iconic characters and so on [but] it was never that back then, and you have to remember, too, that Arnold was not a superstar," Biehn told Den of Geek. "He was basically a bodybuilder and Mr. Universe and, with all respect due to him for being Mr. Universe, but all he had done at that time was Conan, and people didn't take him particularly seriously as an actor." Schwarzenegger went on to cement his action hero status with 1987's Predator, but for Biehn, that star-making role never came.
His most noteworthy appearances since have been in 1996's The Rock and 2007's Grindhouse, in which he played a commander and a sheriff, respectively. Taking part in Grindhouse rekindled a love for B-movies that Biehn forgot he had and inspired him to start his own production company specializing in grindhouse-style features. As he told Forbes, "I thought we could make that kind of movie and realized that we didn't need big budgets to do it."
