Sigourney Weaver Opens Up About Legacy of ‘Alien’ & If She Would Ever Return to the Franchise

Lauren Novak August 28, 4:12 pm

ALIEN, Sigourney Weaver, 1979 TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection. — Everett Collection

Sigourney Weaver recently received the highly acclaimed Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Best known for movies such as Alien, Ghostbusters and Avatar, Weaver recently sat down in a rare interview with Deadline in honor of the award and discussed the incredible legacy of Alien, one of the most beloved sci-fi films of all time.

Alien was one of Weaver’s first movie roles and continues to be the film she is most known for, playing the iconic Ellen Ripley. She explained that she had just come from Broadway and was very intrigued by the designs and concepts of the film.

20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection

She shared, “What I love about it, which I think endures, is that the character of Ripley is almost an everyman character [most of the characters were written as unisex so they could be played by male or female actors]. That freed me up from ever having to act like a girl or dress like a girl. That was very astute of the writers. At a certain point you even forget that it’s a woman. You just know it’s Ripley and you’re hoping she survives.”

Weaver continued, “I recall that I was filming in France when I received the script for Aliens. It was this almost operatic role for Ridley. I was stunned. It was such a different way of approaching the material, much more muscular and much more akin to an action picture. Alien is perfect. It’s so claustrophobic, frightening and unsettling. And Aliens is this big kick-ass movie of scale, which actually has a more conventional story. But it’s hard to compare them as filmmakers. They are very different. I can say that all four of the Alien filmmakers I worked with [Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet] all made the material their own.”

ALIEN: RESURRECTION, Sigourney Weaver, 1997

Everett Collection

As far as the future for Ripley, Weaver said that she is never counting out a reprisal of the role. While she hasn’t yet seen a script that entices her to play the character again in a new film, she says that if something feels right she would definitely consider playing the character again. She added, “I feel like she’s never far away from me.”