Joss Whedon

Will Ripley Rise Again ? Sigourney Weaver On ‘Alien’ Saga: ‘I Just Don’t Feel That It’s Quite Finished’

It’s official: Ellen Ripley is the most badass female movie character of all time. So now the only question that remains is a simple one: Will we ever see her again? “You know, Fox was going to do another one,” Sigourney Weaver said to us recently while accepting Ripley’s honor. “They had it written. Joss Whedon wrote it.”

As Weaver remembered it, however, the script from the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” mastermind just didn’t rock her world. “It took place on earth,” she explained. “Which, I have to say, just really didn’t interest me. And I just felt that every time we went out there, we needed to have a really original piece.”

Which is a shame, because Weaver said that at the time she was perfectly willing to take on the Aliens once again. “I was all for going back to the original planet; I thought that would be interesting,” she explained. “But I was alone in that; we couldn’t really agree on what would be interesting.”

Soon afterwards, Fox turned their attention to casting a different leading character opposite the Alien, and Weaver’s days as Ripley may have been shut down for good. “Once they were committed to ‘Alien vs. Predator’…” she trailed off. “If you don’t respect the creature - I haven’t seen them - but it just becomes too hum-drum.”

Still, Weaver told us that although she isn’t sitting by the phone these days, she does feel like Ripley still needs a proper send-off. And if somebody could ever write a great Alien script (that presumably wasn’t set on planet Earth), she’d be willing to read it.

“Even in twenty years, if someone came to me and said, ‘This is the story, and it’s a really interesting story using that world’ [I’d do it]. I think it’s an amazing saga,” the 59-year-old actress reasoned. “I don’t sit around thinking, ‘Oh I want to do another Alien,’ but it does feel slightly unfinished to me. But that has a lot to do with Fox, so it wouldn’t surprise me if another generation at Fox, looking at what they have, would [make it work].”

“There have been lots of ‘Alien’ impersonators, but there is something about [that first] one,” she said of Ripley’s original film, as well as the franchise it spawned. “I just don’t feel that it’s quite finished.”