Yahoo Finance Sigourney Weaver Says 'Alien' Script Once Included Sex Scene — and She Told Ridley Scott to Cut It
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Sigourney Weaver says there was a love scene in one iteration of Alien's script — and the Ellen Ripley actress was having none of it.
The Oscar-nominated actress, 72, was a guest on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, where she talked about her life and career. Naturally, she discussed the 1979 sci-fi classic, the Ridley Scott film that helped make her a superstar and launched a billion-dollar franchise.
Weaver said that in one version of the screenplay, there was a love scene, which she told Scott during their first meeting made no sense.
"Would you really get it on while this thing is running around?" she recalled of her winning argument. Maron agreed it would have derailed the horror story with silliness.
Elsewhere, she explained to Maron that her first love was theater and she was having trouble being cast in films due to her 6-foot stature. Weaver said she had no idea what to expect when she met with Scott for the film, but laughingly recalled she was wearing enormous "hooker boots" at the time.
"Fox didn't want me. I was an unknown, and there were people with names trying to get this part. [But] I was on the [producers'] shortlist for reasons that I don't know," she explained. "I wasn't very interested. It was science-fiction, which I knew very little about."
RELATED: Sigourney Weaver Says Playing a Teenager in Avatar 2 Was 'the Biggest Stretch' of Her Career
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Asked if her role of Ripley was in the script, the actress explained that originally there were no female characters before producers Walter Hill and the late David Giler retooled the story to include two women aboard the Nostromo ship. That led to another idea to further shock audiences, she said.
"They thought, 'This is Ten Little Indians; we'll just make the girl the survivor because no one in their wildest dreams will think it is going to end up being the girl. They'll think it's going to end up being John Hurt's character, who's so brave,' " she said.
"So they really did it for story reasons, even though they love strong women," she said. (The other female character was Lambert played by Veronica Cartwright.)
RELATED: Sigourney Weaver Doesn't Plan on Retiring: 'I'm Fine That I Might Be the Oldest Person on the Set'
20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection
Calling it a "little dark wired movie" as she saw it at the time, Weaver said she was often lonely in England during production, outside a close friendship she built with the late Ian Holm, who played Ash, the ship's android science officer. The two would have deep conversations about how they saw Ripley, the actress recalled.
"I remember saying to him, 'Do you think Ripley knows what she's doing? Do you think that she thinks she's right all these times?' And he said, 'Yes. I think that she does know that she's right.' And I said, 'I don't think she does. I think it is a total crap shoot, and she knows it. And she's just got to fly by the seat of per pants, hoping' — because that's the story. It is an every-man story. To me, it's everyone's story," Weaver said.
Weaver's new film The Good House is in theaters Friday.
