Alien: Romulus Director Confirms Major Ripley Easter Egg You Probably Missed

You may not have seen her, but Ellen Ripley was in Alien: Romulus — at least as far as director Fede Álvarez was concerned. He spoke to fans this weekend at a screening and panel hosted by Collider, where he revealed how he conceptualized Ripley being on the Renaissance station along with the main characters of Romulus. It’s pretty airtight, but it does mess with established stories, which some commenters don’t care for. However, The easter egg is officially canon, as Álvarez and the VFX artists on the movie explained. This might even be a hint at a future installment of Alien, or perhaps the sequel Álvarez says he’s already working on.

Romulus takes place between the events of Alien and its sequel, Aliens. A far as fans know, during this time Ripley was cryogenically frozen onboard her escape pod, the Narcissus. By some error, the pod did not take Ripley home, but left her asleep for 57 years before she was finally found. Even in Aliens, this is presented as a possible conspiracy, and Álvarez found it hard to believe. He thought it would be especially hard to accept after Romulus revealed that the company Weyland-Yutani, had managed to track down the xenomorph itself in the middle of space.

“My logic was at some point if Weyland-Yutani could find the Xenomorph floating around the debris of the Nostromo, to find the Narcissus, the shuttle that Ripley escaped in, is the easiest part,” he explained. “It’s a lifeboat; it has a beacon. Yeah, you’ll find her, right? It will be a place to figure out the research of what’s going on. You should go get her. So I’m sure they did, right? So I was like, ‘At some point, the Narcissus has to be inside the Renaissance station somewhere.’ Not only that, I wanted to give an explanation of why Ripley got lost 40 years between [Alien and Aliens]. She was supposed to go to Earth and be in stasis for decades until she gets picked up in Aliens, so I was like, ‘Why did that happen?’ So I thought, ‘Because they picked her up.’”

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Álvarez has essentially set up a completely new interquel for Ripley within the runtime of Romulus, but the audience only gets distant glimpses of it. “It’s a massive station, right?” he said. “You get to see, like, probably 3% of the corridors that that station has. When you see them, think about the scale. So there’s plenty of room for Ripley to be around doing her thing, and then when she realized the whole thing was going to blow up, she had to get back to the Narcissus and get the f— out of there.”

This isn’t just headcanon, either. “So, if you watch, if you look closely, you’ll see the Narcissus twice in the movie in the background in a couple of sections where they walk by it, and you can see it right there on the wall,” Álvarez revealed. “Then, of course, she cannot die, so in the big explosion at the end when the station is crashing on the rings, you have to show the Narcissus leaving. I asked these guys, ‘Can you give me a Narcissus there?’ And they were like, ‘We’re on it!’ And they were all excited about it.”

The only loose end with this addition is that it’s never mentioned in Aliens. The movie starts with Ripley waking up on a space station orbiting earth, and she recounts her experience on the Nostromo but says nothing of this pit stop on Renaissance Station. However, it does help explain how she was lost for so long, and it makes the power of Weyland-Yutani all the more terrifying.

For now, fans can decide for themselves whether this Easter egg adds to the story or not, but if it is incorporated into future sequels, it may become undeniable. Alien: Romulus is streaming now on Hulu.