At age 18, he made his big move from Alabama hometown to LA. After two years of intensive training, Biehn made his professional stage bow. In 1978, he was cast as Mark Johnson, the hard-veneered but vulnerable ward of psychiatrist Robert Reed, in the TV series Operation Runaway. For the next few years, malevolence was Biehn's on-screen strong suit, first as the psycho title character in 1981's The Fan, then as the neofascist military-school upperclassman in The Lords of Discipline (1982). After switching gears with the sympathetic role of futuristic android-hunter Kyle Reese in director James Cameron's The Terminator, Michael Biehn became a member of Cameron's informal stock company, playing dazzling leading roles in Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1988) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).