Sigourney Weaver Had A Major Problem With Aliens Before She Agreed to Return

Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Ellen Ripley is a hallmark of science fiction, but Weaver was somewhat reluctant to return for 1986’s Aliens for one specific reason. Taking place 57 years after 1979’s Alien and with James Cameron replacing Ridley Scott in the director’s chair, Aliens brings Ripley out of hypersleep and into a new conflict with the race of vicious aliens known as Xenomorphs after a human colony on the planet LV-426 goes radio silent. Acting as an advisor to a unit of marines sent to the colony, Ripley and the soldiers soon find themselves in a full-scale war against the Xenomorphs that have overtaken the human outpost, which they soon discover is just hours away from being vaporized in an impending nuclear blast.

Weaver’s first performance as Ripley in Alien launched her career, but Aliens is often regarded by many as the definitive portrayal of Ripley in the entire Alien franchise, with Weaver even earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her turn in the film. However, Weaver’s return as Ripley was not necessarily a guarantee. As revealed by Weaver herself in a 2024 interview with Variety, the heavy presence of guns in Aliens gave her some trepidation about coming back.

Sigourney Weaver’s Views On Guns Made Her Reluctant To Return For Aliens (And How James Cameron Talked Her Into It)

Per Weaver in her interview with Variety, “The one thing, of course, I wasn’t thrilled about was all the guns. I read very quickly because I’m trying to experience the story and I had left out reading a lot of the stage directions, which had a lot of guns in them.” A supporter of gun control, Weaver then spoke to Cameron about her reluctance to fire guns in Aliens and about their significant presence in the movie.

To show Weaver the necessity of guns in the Aliens story, Cameron then took Weaver “out into the back field and had me shoot off a couple hundred rounds of this machine gun”, an experience which Weaver described as “unfortunately very addictive.” Weaver says that Cameron’s intention in taking Weaver to a firing range was to show her the kind of mental and psychological transformation that Ripley experiences in Aliens, which involves not just a great deal of heavy gun fire, but unleashing it upon an enemy that no real-world human has ever had to face.

Ripley’s Transformation From Alien To Aliens Requires Her To Be Good With Weaponry

When Ripley is first introduced in Ridley Scott’s Alien, she’s a very different person from who she becomes in Aliens. Working as the space equivalent of a crew on a shipping boat, Ripley and her fellow members of the Nostromo team are otherwise regular working class people until the Chestburster hatches out of the chest of Kane (John Hurt) and grows into a human-sized monster. In the end, Ripley is, in her own words, “last survivor of the Nostromo” when she and her cat Jones go into hypersleep aboard the Nostromo‘s emergency escape ship. However, rather than being rescued soon after as she expects, Ripley remains floating through space asleep for the next 57 years, awakening two years after the death of her daughter.

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The circumstances of Ripley’s awakening (including being demoted by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation after being unable to prove the Xenomorph’s rampage aboard the Nostromo) leave Ripley jarred enough, but she’s shaken to her core upon learning that a human colony on LV-426 is under threat by more Xenomorphs. Ripley knows she’s going into a war with aliens even more so than the marines do, and that requires her to eventually become adept with firearms herself, under the instruction of Corporal Dwayne Hicks (Michael Biehn). With the entire colony crawling with Xenomorphs, the only chance any of the human characters have at survival is fighting back with heavy artillery. That eventually includes Ripley when she arms herself with a machine gun, flamethrower, and grenades to enter the Xenomorph Queen’s nest to rescue the captured Newt (Carrie Henn). The entire experience from Alien to Aliens that transforms Ripley into a warrior mirrors Sarah Connor’s journey from The Terminator to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and in the case of both, it would be next to impossible to tell their stories without arming them to the teeth.

Aliens Wouldn’t Work Without A Lot Of Guns

The Xenomorphs are a vicious and extremely formidable species of aliens, and it would it a fool’s errand to knowingly enter any territory they inhabit without being heavily armed and prepared. Of course, even this isn’t a guarantee of survival, as illustrated by the Xenomorphs overtaking the human colony of LV-426 and wiping out the entire team of highly trained and armed marines with the sole exception of Hicks. To have a chance at survival in a Xenomorph attack, being armed is the only option.

Though Ripley has no military background, her transformation into a formidable Xenomorph hunter in Aliens comes not just from Ripley’s knowledge of how deadly the creatures are, but her preparedness when she heads into battle against them herself. Moreover, on a more general level, Aliens is often seen as an allegory of the Vietnam War, with the movie’s armed and trained marines heading into battle against a far less technologically advanced enemy who nonetheless proves extremely deadly with their use of guerilla tactics. From every angle of its story, Aliens simply couldn’t function on a narrative or even logical level without the presence of heavy artillery. When all’s said and done, Aliens turns Ripley from a survivor into an action heroine, and functionally, Ripley’s use of futuristic firearms is a tool to set up her transformation. But more than that, in sending Ripley into what ends up being an all-out war, Cameron, Weaver, and Aliens itself simply had to put a gun in Ripley’s hands to work.

All the Alien movies are available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, and the Alien: Earth TV series will begin streaming on Hulu sometime in 2025.