[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Alien: Romulus.”]
For a long time, actress and filmmaker Aileen Wu had a good excuse for not watching the “Alien” films. They scared her. No, they really scared her.
“I love sci-fi. I can’t really do horror because I was shown a couple very creepy, intense films as a kid, and it all resulted in me wetting my bed at night, and then my mom stopped showing me horror films,” Wu said with a laugh during a recent interview with IndieWire. “So no, I did not grow up with this franchise, but I always knew of it. It’s so iconic. I didn’t watch the first one until I got the audition notice, and I was like, ‘OK, time to do some homework.’ And I thought, what a brilliant, perfect film.”
The audition notice in question was for Fede Álvarez’s “Alien: Romulus,” the seventh film in the venerable franchise first kicked off with Ridley Scott’s 1979 smash hit “Alien.” In this new installment, set between the events of “Alien” and “Aliens,” a group of young space colonists, eager to get off the dismal Weyland-Yutani mining colony they’ve been trapped on for seemingly forever, hatch an ambitious plan to raid a decommissioned space station for the power and supplies they need to escape.
Of course, when they arrive on said space station, they’re very much not alone. As the young crew — including Wu as the tough-talking pilot Navarro, Cailee Spaeny as the clever Rain, David Jonsson as her shy android “brother” Andy, and Archie Renaux as the brave Tyler — attempts to get what they need and not die while doing it, things go very much awry.
Wu knew that from the start, as she said that all three of her original audition scenes are in the final film, and yes, that includes the second scene she auditioned with: the moment a Facehugger is pulled off her face. Ahead, the breakout star of “Alien: Romulus” breaks down three essential parts of her experience getting into character and how the hell you endure days of being “attacked” by some of the nastiest aliens in cinematic lore.
[One more time: Spoilers for “Alien: Romulus” ahead.]
Getting Into Character, with a Buzz
Even before Wu shot a frame of Álvarez’s film, she was thinking about the finer points of being Navarro, like, oh, what does her hair look like?
“When I read the script originally for the audition, it said, ‘Navarro rocks a mullet,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, amazing. I have a mullet right now,’” Wu said. “Then once I got there, our hair and makeup designer was doing some tests on me, and Fede walked in, looked at me in the mirror, and then was just like, ‘Shave it off. You down to shave it off? Let’s shave it off.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”
Wu previously shaved her head a number of times since 2019 — “I was very familiar with a shaved head and going to the barber shops and being like, ‘Give me a 1.5 all around!’” — and thought the choice made sense for the no-nonsense Navarro.
“It suits her. She’s very hands-on,” Wu said. “The first scene [where we see Navarro], she’s welding a piece of her ship back together. I think she was just a ‘shaving her head at home every day by herself’ kind of girl.”
The choice also speaks to the bond Wu — herself a budding filmmaker — felt with Álvarez, who she said made it a priority to make sure she felt safe, secure, and supported during her first major film role, even when the experience also required she be ready for anything.
“I knew that it was going to be a challenge physically,” Wu said. “Fede prepped me quite a bit on the first Zoom call we had. As the director of a project, you are the captain of the ship; you are the guiding North Star for a bunch of people lost in the woods at night, so you have to be still and precise and know exactly what you want. Fede was under so much pressure, but he was so kind and so patient with everybody. Really, the more precise you can get, the easier everybody’s job is. It actually makes for more room to have creative, collaborative conversations because then it comes down to the nitty-gritty details of things.”
Meet the Facehugger
Navarro isn’t the first member of the crew to run afoul of the Xenomorphs — Jonsson, Renaux, and Spike Fearn first meet them in a tense, lab-set sequence — but she is the first one to actually get the grand treatment by the little guys. That means being violently attacked, tossed on the ground, getting a Facehugger latched on to the face, with proboscis zipping down the throat to implant the egg.
“There were two Facehugger days. The first one is the attack, and the thrashing-on-the-ground sequence after that. I think we filmed that in three, four days,” Wu said. “The first day was a lot of wire work. The camera sees me fly across the room, my head snaps back. I’m really surprised that my neck survived that day, but I’ve never worked with wires before, so it was a bit tricky. I practiced, I had a lot of rehearsals with the stunt team before that day, and then when it came down to actually shooting it in a space and watching playback, I realized, ‘Oh, I had to marry the stunt practical side and my character, creative, artistic side of it to make the perfect thing.’ If I could go back knowing that already, I would’ve tweaked it a bit more.”
As the rest of the crew freaks out around an unconscious Navarro, Wu had to lay on the ground with an actual puppet attached to her face. Operated by a puppeteer just out of frame, the Facehugger on Wu’s mug even breathed, and Wu had to match her own breathing to it.
“And then the scene where it was on my face and I’m just laying there, those were hard days, because I’m literally just laying there while the whole scene is taking place,” she said. “The hardest part was matching my breathing with the creature’s bladders. Fede was very precise about that, he was like, ‘This one’s for the fans. The hardcore fans are going to know the biology of this creature and how it sustains the process of laying that egg in you. It has to keep you breathing, so whenever the bladder is full on the creature, you have no breath. And when the bladders are empty, that’s when it’s giving you the breath.’”
So: breathing to match the puppet, not freaking out over the fingers wrapped around your head, and a little tug-tug tail for good measure. Easy, right?
“That was hard, to coordinate with one of the puppeteers who’s offscreen with a balloon pump pumping the bladders in and out,” Wu said. “Then the fingers are [around my head and] tied with eight different rubber bands, and then the tail is wrapped around my neck with a fishing line so that they could tug on it and it would squeeze the neck.”
Eventually, the Facehugger is yanked off Navarro’s face, which delighted Wu, even as she was also covered in, as she tells it, more lube than the entire city of Budapest could support on its own.
“There was one more hugger scene, where it comes off my face, and that was probably my favorite one to shoot because it’s just that one shot,” she said. “It’s just that one profile shot, the fricking disgusting thing coming off out of my body. With the hugger itself, there was someone on the controllers maneuvering the fingers, so it was struggling while it was getting pulled off my face, and then there was someone doing the bit [in my throat], and then there was someone on lube duty because everything, every inch of that creature, was lubed up. That was really disgusting. Someone had a bucket for me, and would run in and have me spit out the lube and wash my mouth before we did the next take.”
She added with a laugh, “It’s important that they’re very wet. By the time we shot that scene, I heard someone from the makeup team or someone from the visual effects team say that we had bought out all the lube in Budapest, and they had to ship it from London.”
Introducing the Chestburster
If you’re up on your “Alien” lore, you know what happens after a Facehugger spends some time attached to your face and inserting eggs down your neck. Hello, Chestburster. For nearly a week total, Álvarez, Wu, and the rest of the cast and crew set about ending Navarro with a bang. Or a burst.
Navarro does make it back to the crew’s small spaceship, but when her chest starts moving in a decidedly inhuman way, we know what’s coming. She doesn’t.
“The puppeteers were the team from Alec Gillis who worked on the first original ‘Alien’ films, and that was very special,” Wu said. “So there were fake legs, because my actual body from the chest down was in a hole. They literally cut open the floor of the cockpit and built a bicycle chair situation for me to sit in it. My arms were my real arms, and then the prosthetic piece was attached at my collarbone.”
That prosthetic chest piece was hollow, so the puppeteers could feed the Chestburster out “through” Wu. This first part of the process took about three hours. After she was settled in, things would get really wild. (And repetitive, as Wu estimates they shot the bursting twenty to thirty times.)
“There was a very small piece right here,” Wu said, gesturing to the area around her heart, “and it had a balloon inside and they would pump air to make it look like it was protruding. Meanwhile, the makeup team used a mixture of lemon juice and vinegar and baking soda to make the foam that’s foaming at my character’s mouth. That was really disgusting. The prosthetic piece right where my heart is had a lever and they would press a button, and it was a very intense and aggressive cracking open of my rib cage. And then the little creature would come out and chew through its embryonic sac. There was also a lot of lube involved in that scene because in order for it to chew through the sack, it needed to be quite lubricated.”
After the Chestburster does its, well, bursting, Navarro might be gone, but Wu was still needed on set. “Those days afterwards, there was a full piece that was attached to the front of my body, and there’s a huge wound gashing open right here,” she said. “I just had to lay there and be dead, and that was quite fun.”
So what’s next for Wu? “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to see what happens after this film comes out, but I’m always working on my own things. I write a lot, and I have something brewing, and I’m really excited to share [IT] with the world once it’s ready.”
For now, she’s enjoying the ride. She’s even found the time to catch up with old friends, like the hundreds of Facehugger masks Disney passed out at the film’s Hollywood premiere on Monday. “My favorite part at the afterparty was watching all the different ways that men were wearing it,” she said with a laugh. “Some had it slung around the shoulder, some of it looped the tail around the belt hoop. They were getting very inventive with it!”
A 20th Century Studios release, “Alien: Romulus” is now in theaters.
