A lot of actors tend to take the roles that have made them famous for granted, but legendary actress Sigourney Weaver isn’t one of them. Indeed, when I asked her whether she’d be interested in doing another Alien sequel sometime in the future – during our interview concerning the upcoming release of the Alien Anthology Blu-ray box set – she gave me a typically thoughtful and reverent response about the possibility of returning.
“You know, it would be interesting for me to go back now and revisit the character, an older Ripley, but I can’t really see how to do that,” she told me. “I think it’s probably a better idea to do the prequel and start afresh with only whatever the alien community might be. In terms of the character, it would be awesome to be able to play a woman like Ripley at my age. I certainly think the audience would be fine with it. To show how capable an older person is in something difficult, in a situation that’s difficult. So I don’t know, life is a strange thing. Maybe something will pop up where I can maybe combine some of the elements that made Ripley so special.”

Of course, there has in the past been talk of this actually happening – though Weaver left it alone because she wasn’t interested in setting the movie on Earth, as had been discussed.

“We were thinking about doing this fifth one and I didn’t really want to go ahead and do it and do it on earth, so we kind of left the sentence unfinished,” she told me. “[But] there’s something slightly unfinished to me about it. Again, it’s not something I really sit around… I would have liked to see Ripley try to have a normal life, try to find happiness, at least for a little while. I feel we owe her that.”