NEED TO KNOW
Could Sigourney Weaver take to space as Alien’s Ellen Ripley once more?
Weaver, 76, said during a New York Comic Con panel on Friday, Oct. 10 that she recently had a meeting with Disney, which owns the rights to the Alien horror franchise, about potentially reprising her role as the series’ main hero in a future sequel. The actress described reading the beginning of a potential script from series producer/writer Walter Hill.
“You know, Walter Hill is a very good friend of mine and he wrote 50 pages of where Ripley would be now and they are quite extraordinary,” Weaver said during a panel on the Alien franchise, when asked by moderator Josh Horowitz whether she’s had any conversations about playing the part again.
“So I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I have had a meeting with Fox, Disney or whoever it is now,” Weaver added, to laughter. “I have never felt the need [to reprise the role.] I was always like ‘let her rest, let her recover.’ But what Walter has written is, first of all, seems so true to me, as very much about the society that would incarcerate someone who has tried to help mankind, but she’s a problem to them so she’s sort of tucked away.”
Weaver, who has been acting for the screen since 1977, made her big screen breakthrough as the lead character in director Ridley Scott’s 1979 original Alien, which saw Ripley encounter the franchise’s now-iconic Xenomorph alien in space along with the crew of a commercial space ship in the distant future.
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Weaver’s Ripley is the only character to survive the original movie, and she became the franchise’s hero over its next three films. She has not played the part for the big screen since 1997’s Alien: Resurrection, though she did once intend on reprising her role for a never-produced sequel from director Neil Blomkamp, as she told Total Film in 2023.
“I think it’s a very strong first 50 pages. I’m thinking about working with Walter to see what the rest of the story would be,” Weaver told the New York Comic Con audience. Producer and screenwriter Hill, 83, has produced all of the movies in the Alien franchise, including last year’s Alien: Romulus, and received screenplay credits on 1986’s Aliens and 1992’s Alien 3.
“It would not be running around airshafts, it would be a very different kind of Alien,” Weaver cautioned of the theoretical future movie. “Scary, of course, the Alien does show up, inevitable. But I love what he’s done with the character. He really gets her strength and her anger and her humor, and it’s very hard to write, and surprisingly hard to write Ripley.”
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Last year’s Romulus was set in between the events of the original Alien and Aliens. It eschews Weaver’s character in favor of following a number of young space colonists on a different planet who encounter the titular aliens as they try to escape from their home on a spaceship. In August, FX and Hulu also debuted a spinoff series titled Alien: Earth that takes place before the original movie.
As Alien fans await Weaver’s potential return to the franchise, the actress can next be found on the big screen in Avatar: Fire and Ash, which releases Dec. 19.
