Sigourney Weaver’s xenomorph fighting days may not be behind her just yet.
The actress confirmed that she “had a meeting” with Disney about reprising her role as Ellen Ripley in another Alien installment and expressed her interest in working with Walter Hill, who produced Ridley Scott’s original 1979 film, to create a “very different kind of Alien.”
“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 an Alien reunion panel at New York Comic Con on Friday. “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.”
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Weaver starred as the fearless officer Ripley in four separate Alien films: Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), and as her clone in Alien: Resurrection (1997).
At the panel, she explained that, outside of Neill Blomkamp’s unrealized Alien movie, she wasn’t interested in bringing the character back to the big screen ever again.
“Except for Neil, I’ve never felt the need to reprise the role. I was always like, ‘Let her rest! Let her recover!’” Weaver said. “But what Walter has written is so…first of all, seems so true to me. It’s 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 tucked away.”
She reiterated her excitement over Hill’s “very strong first 50 pages” and voiced her interest in teaming up with the filmmaker on the “very different” project.
“I’m thinking about working with Walter to see what the rest of the story would be,” she said. “It would not be running around air shafts. It would be a very different kind of Alien with a really good script. Scary.”
And, don’t worry, Weaver noted that “the alien does show up” in Hill’s pages, too.
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“It’s inevitable,” she said. “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. It’s surprisingly hard to write Ripley. Everybody makes you sound like a gym teacher. ‘All right, people, let’s do business!’ So Walter has it.”
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Weaver recently made headlines when she revealed that she watches FX’s Alien: Earth spinoff with her husband because, after all of their shared history, she is still very much afraid of xenomorphs.
“I have to make a date with my husband because I don’t want to see it by myself in case one of those things comes out of the screen,” she said at the time. “So we have to set it up. So I’m behind seeing it, but the ones I’ve seen are fascinating.”
She went on to praise the Noah Hawley-created series, noting that it’s less focused on aliens and more about “our world, what’s going to be happening to it, what’s going to be important, the role of greed.”
She continued, “It’s just exploded some of the themes that have always been part of the Alien series, and I think it’s beautifully cast and beautifully done. I can’t believe it’s television, frankly.”
