Partial poster for “Alien: Romulus” featuring Aileen Wu’s character, Navarro, and a Facehugger … [+]
Alien: Romulus star Aileen Wu said only practical makeup effects went into her chilling Facehugger Xenomorph scenes in the film.
Opening in theaters nationwide on Friday, Alien: Romulus marks the seventh chapter in the sci-fi horror saga that kicked off with director Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien. Scott produces Alien: Romulus while Fede Alvarez directs the film, which is set between the events of Alien and James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens.
Alien: Romulus chronicles the harrowing plight of a group of young mining colonists who take a ship to an abandoned space outpost to scavenge the derelict vessel for cryo pods. Since the renegades plan to leave their dreary mining colony behind for a destination where sunlight is a luxury, they need the pods for a cryo sleep cycle since the planetary system they are traveling to is nine years away.
But when the group inadvertently unleashes hundreds of Xenomorphs after they board the outpost, they’re forced to come face-to-face with the most horrifying species in the galaxy.
Wu plays Navarro in Alien: Romulus, who becomes the first victim of the Xenomorph attack. The revelation of Navarro’s fate is hardly a plot spoiler for Alien: Romulus, though, since the attack of the character is shown in the film’s trailer.
In fact, the marketing department for Alien: Romulus goes so far as to reveal what happens to Navarro because her head is firmly in the grasp of a Facehugger Xenomorph on the film’s main theatrical poster, which is pictured above.
“They didn’t tell me anything about the poster until the day it came out. Then I saw it and I was like, ‘This is a sick poster.’ I like the colors, the side profile, the hug—everything,” Wu told me ,smiling, in a Zoom conversation on Tuesday.
Aileen Wu in “Alien: Romulus.”
True, Wu’s face doesn’t make the poster, but she doesn’t mind. In fact, she prefers the Facehugger takes center stage in the image.
“Honestly, I love it that it’s not my face. I feel like if it was my face on the poster it would be way too much pressure. I would prefer for the back of my shaved head to be taking over the world instead of the front of my face,” Wu said with a laugh, adding, “I don’t love looking at my own face, as most actors are.”
While Alien: Romulus is set between Lt. Ellen Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) battles with the Xenomorphs in Alien and Aliens, the film contains several references to the other films in the sci-fi horror saga. Weaver, of course, famously shaved her head when she reprised Ripley in Alien 3 but Wu said her shaved head in the film wasn’t an homage but came about by mere happenstance.
“Fede [Alvarez] and I never explicitly talked about it. I’ve been rocking a shaved head since 2019 and sometimes I would let it grow out to this mullet-y length right now,” Wu said, pointing to her current hairdo. “But when I taped the audition, got the role and got to set, I had a mullet. In my headshots, though, I had a shaved head like I do in that film.”
Since Alvarez remembered Wu’s headshots, he decided early in the production that Navarro should have the shaved head look.
“Once we started doing makeup tests, Fede came into the makeup room one day and was like, ‘Shave it off, shave it all off like what she looks like in her headshots.’ I was like, ‘Great. I love it.’ I love having no hair. It’s so easy,” Wu recalled.
“I personally think when we decided to shave it, it not only felt like a callback to Sigourney Weaver in the third one, but also Private Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) in [Aliens],” Wu added. “I feel like my character is quite similar to Vasquez in a very hang-out with the boys, tomboyish sort of way.”
Going Face To Face With The Facehugger Xenomorphs
While Alien: Romulus gives Aileen Wu and her castmates some time to establish their characters in a subtle manner at the beginning of the film, all of their quiet time is thrown out of the window once the Xenomorphs arrive on the scene.
As the first victim of the alien attack in the film, Navarro is knocked around violently before a Facehugger Xenomorph firmly grasps her head. Since Fede Alvarez implemented the same sort of practical makeup and in-camera visual effects in Alien: Romulus that were featured in the original Alien films, it meant Wu would be fitted with a physical Facehugger that she estimated to weigh three to four pounds.
“It was pretty heavy. It was hollowed out a little bit, so the actual psychosexual organ part of the feature wasn’t there so the piece could mold around your face,” Wu recalled.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 12: (L-R) Aileen Wu and Fede Álvarez attend the Alien: Romulus World … [+]
While the production made Wu as comfortable as possible, she did note that being fitted with a Facehugger inhibited her breathing at times since the piece was secured tightly to her head with rubber bands. Overall, Wu estimated, the segment—from the time the Xenomorph attaches to her face to when she thrashes around as it chokes her to the moment the crew extracts it—took about two or three days to shoot.
“When we shot it, one take was at least three, four minutes and I had to match the [Facehugger] bladder’s breathing,” Wu said. “The bladder’s breathing was real as well, since someone was off camera pumping it with a balloon pump.”
Wu said that Alvarez was very detail-oriented in the execution of the scene because, after four decades, he knows that Alien fans are paying very close attention to details when it comes to Facehugger and other Xenomorph attacks.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 12: (L-R) Spike Fearn, Isabela Merced and Aileen Wu attend the Alien: … [+]
“Fede was very adamant and precise and said, ‘Hey Aileen, the true fans are going to know how the organism works, and that it sustains your livelihood while it’s doing its job,” Wu recalled. “So, when you breathe in, it’s giving you air and when you breathe out, that’s it taking air back out from you.’ Since I couldn’t see anything and only feel—and did so much thrashing around, violently, on the ground—it took a while to really nail that scene down.”
Wu’s demanding work didn’t end, however, when the crew removed the Facehugger Xenomorph from her face. They had to pull the apparatus of the creature from her mouth, too, and like the Facehugger, it was all done through practical makeup effects and some puppetry.
“So, while the hugger was coming off of my face—let’s call it the tongue—the tongue part would be pushed forward as the hugger was leaving my face,” Wu revealed. So only two or three inches of it was in my mouth at a time but it had to match. There was quite a bit of coordinating involved.”
Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu, Fede Álvarez, Ridley Scott, Isabela Merced and Archie Renaux at the premiere … [+]
As physically demanding as the tongue scene was, Wu said she couldn’t have been any more thrilled about how it looked on screen.
“That scene, when I saw it in the theaters, I was like, ‘Yes!’ because it’s just one shot—a tight profile shot,” Wu said. “While you’re filming, you’re like, ‘We either have the shot or we don’t and we’re not stopping until we get the f—king shot.’ I think we did at least 30 to 40 takes.”
Since Wu spent so much time working with Facehugger Xenomorphs on Alien: Romulus, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that she’s okay if she never sees another one of them again. In fact, Wu said if she were offered to keep one of them as a souvenir from the production, she would have refused.
“I’ve had enough of the creatures. I spent plenty of time with them on set,” Wu said. “Even at the premiere, everybody was holding a Facehugger. I was like, ‘Get those things away from me! I don’t want them anywhere near me!’”
Wu does admit, though, that she grew close enough to her Facehugger “co-stars” that she gave names to all of them.
“I named them Sam, Sammy, Samuel and Samantha,” Wu recalled with a laugh. “It was all some Sam variation, because I thought Sam was a nice gender-neutral name, since it has both male and female sex organs.”
So if Wu is refusing to take a Facehugger prop from the production, is there something else from Alien: Romulus or specifically, Navarro, that she’s interested in?
“I would take my character’s boots,” Wu said, smiling. “She had these badass cowboy boots.”
Also starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced and Spike Fearn, Alien: Romulus opens in theaters on Friday.
This interview was edited for clarity.
