The Studio Didn’t Think Aliens Needed Sigourney Weaver
Ian Nathan’s book “Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film” covers Weaver’s casting. Late to her New York audition because she entered the wrong building, Weaver showed up in “thigh-high hooker boots” and a handful of theater credits to her name (on top of an education at Stanford and then Yale Drama School). She bore little resemblance to Ripley, at that point an inexperienced but steadfast warrant officer. Weaver’s connection to the character was threadbare at first, and she was less than impressed with the script. She told The Guardian:
“I didn’t want to do it. It was sci-fi, and I was a total snob. I wanted to do Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Shakespeare.”
Naturally, she got the part, earning a $30K paycheck and launching her career into orbit. The One Who Lived beyond “Alien” should have been a shoe-in for the sequel, but it wasn’t so easy.
No Weaver, no Ripley, no movie
“I was asked to write a story based on Ripley. Later on it turned out that everybody but us thought that the film could be made without Sigourney Weaver, which completely blew my mind, and was absolutely out of the question for us. So, as far as we were concerned, we started with Ripley from the end of the last film, and it was her story. We, fortunately, were able to overcome these obstacles in the minds of the other people involved. We had to fight very hard for Sigourney to be in the picture, which to me was crazy …”
