The Terminator, Star Wars, and the lost villain roles of Matt Smith

Doctor Who star Matt Smith had villain roles in two huge franchises in the 2010s – but neither panned out. We take a look back. Leaping to fame as the Eleventh Doctor in 2010, Matt Smith has since built a successful career on stage and screen. He’s landed major roles in such expensive productions as ... The Terminator, Star Wars, and the lost villain roles of Matt Smith

Doctor Who star Matt Smith had villain roles in two huge franchises in the 2010s – but neither panned out. We take a look back.

Leaping to fame as the Eleventh Doctor in 2010, Matt Smith has since built a successful career on stage and screen. He’s landed major roles in such expensive productions as The Crown and House Of The Dragon, but has produced his most interesting work as a character actor in films including Edgar Wright’s Last Night In Soho and, most recently, Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing. 

During the course of the past decade, though, there have been a couple of major films that could have given Smith some memorable turns as a villain. We got a brief taste of one of them in 2015, which was intended as the introduction of a pivotal character in an entire trilogy of sci-fi action dystopias. Then there was his possible role as the most evil ruler in the galaxy at the end of the 2010s.

Here’s a look back at the Matt Smith villains that never quite panned out…

The Terminator: Genisys sequels

On the set of Terminator: Genisys, Matt Smith found himself in a rather awkward situation: sitting in a fold-out chair in front of a group of journalists, he was expected to talk about starring in the sequel – but without giving a single story detail away.

“Obviously, I can’t talk in too much detail about the specifics of my character,” Matt Smith mumbled awkwardly. “But needless to say I have close interest and links to John Connor. So yeah. What else do you want to know? I love football!”

The roundtable interview was so vague and awkward that, at one point, a journalist pointed to Smith’s bright green socks and asked if they were something to do with his character. Minutes earlier, Arnold Schwarzenegger had been interviewed with a splodge of green on his face – a placeholder for the metallic battle damage that VFX artists were to add in later.

Were the green socks going to be replaced with, say, metal feet?

No, Smith replied. They were just his regular green socks from home.

Smith had good reason to be cagey. The Doctor Who star had a small yet pivotal role in Terminator: Genisys – the 2015 reboot directed by Alan Taylor. At first, he was plain old Alex, a footsoldier in the human resistance movement against the machines. But there was a twist: Alex was actually a T-5000 – a humanoid embodiment of the evil Skynet. 

Just as Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) was sent back to 1984, he had time to see Alex reveal his true identity and infect resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) with countless nanobots.

Taylor’s sequel therefore took the established lore of The Terminator and T2: Judgment Day and threw it into chaos, creating a new timeline in which the artificially-intelligent Skynet emerges from a smartphone app called Genisys. And while Matt Smith’s role in the reboot was brief at just a couple of minutes or so, the intention was to have his T-5000 be the overarching villain in a trilogy of movies.

“They dealt more with how the future and where Skynet comes from and what that sort of time loop is,” Alan Taylor said in 2020. “You know, the Matt Smith character. It became much more of a focus, so they were probably a little trippier and stood away from T2 a little more. Started having their own identity.”

Unfortunately, the Genisys trilogy didn’t get a chance to forge its own identity. An ill-advised marketing campaign, slow ticket sales and hostile reviews nipped plans for two further films and a spin-off TV series in the bud. With it went Smith’s potentially interesting villain: a coolly-intelligent superbeing capable of turning humans to his will. We can only guess what the actor might have done with an expanded version of that role.

In a further awkward interview moment, Matt Smith discovered during a live podcast recording that the Terminator: Genisys sequels had been quietly removed from Paramount’s release schedule.

 “I didn’t know that, that’s news to me,” Smith said to IGN. “Thank you for filling me in.” 

Smith wore red and black striped socks during that particular exchange.

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker

Just over two years after Smith received the news about the Genisys trilogy’s untimely death, along came news of another huge franchise offer. In August 2018, it was reported that Smith had landed a role in Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, then filming in the UK under the gaze of director JJ Abrams. 

Little was known about the part Smith was set to play at that point, but word soon came down the pipeline that he was to play a villain – perhaps Emperor Palpatine’s son, or even a younger clone of Palpatine himself. While Smith didn’t name the character he was set to play, he did confirm that he was initially cast in the Star Wars sequel, but added that his role was written out before a single scene was shot.

“We were close to me being in it,” Smith told the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “but then it just never quite happened. I think the thing they were thinking of me for, eventually the part became obsolete and they didn’t need it and so I never got to be in Star Wars.”

When asked point-blank whether he was set to play Palpatine’s son, Smith replied coyly, “I couldn’t possibly say,” adding, “but it was a pretty groovy part and concept. It was a big thing. A big story detail. A transformative Star Wars story detail – but it never quite got over the line. It was a big shift in the history of the franchise.”

The production of The Rise Of Skywalker was famously rather fraught. The passing of Carrie Fisher meant that any scenes involving Leia Organa had to be retooled to fit existing footage. JJ Abrams stepped in as director late in the pipeline, and there was such a rush to get the film finished for its pre-set 2019 release date that there was an editor on set assembling the footage during the shoot. The script was also being rewritten as filming went on, and it’s perhaps during these rewrites that the decision was made to drop Matt Smith and bring in the original Palpatine himself, actor Ian McDiarmid.

McDiarmid’s return as Palpatine was dramatically announced – to a mixture of joy and bewilderment – at Star Wars Celebration in April 2019.

Which brings us to an intriguing detail: As of the 30th April that year, Disney’s official press page (archived) relating to The Rise Of Skywalker listed Matt Smith among the cast:

By the 19th May 2019, Matt Smith’s name had gone:

Circumstantial proof, perhaps, that McDiarmid replaced Smith? Quite possibly. 

Again, it’s a wonder what Smith could have done as a younger Palpatine or a cackling member of his clan. It’s certainly possible to imagine him relishing the chance to play a Sith-powered despot in much the same way that McDiarmid has over the course of the franchise.

We’ll never know what Smith might have looked like in that particular role, but there is a somewhat happy ending to this story. In August 2025, it was announced that Smith had landed another villain role – this time in Star Wars: Starfighter. Once again, we don’t know the identity of his protagonist, but barring a last-minute upset, it sounds as though Smith will finally get the Lucasverse role he deserves. 

In the Star Wars universe, to borrow a line from Luke Skywalker, “No one’s ever really gone.”