Alien: Romulus stars first reactions to seeing the Xenomorph
The Alien: Romulus cast on being ‘terrified’ by Xenomorph
Watch Alien: Romulus stars first reactions to seeing the Xenomorph
When the Alien: Romulus cast first met their on-screen adversary, the eponymous Xenomrph, they were on set, in character, and ready to be terrified.
"We didn't actually see the Xenomorphs until our characters needed to," Archie Renaux, previously best known for the Netflix series Shadow and Bone, tells Yahoo UK.
"We were getting built up to it, and at that point, we're kind of in the zone, and then we see it, and we're like, ‘Oh!’ They are genuinely so huge. Terrifying. It's very, very intimidating."
Renaux’s not the first to come face-to-face with the Xenomorph, the terrifying creation of surrealist H. R. Giger that first appeared in Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi horror Alien. In fact, Alien: Romulus is the seventh main-line instalment in the long-running franchise, and takes place between the original Alien and the seminal follow-up Aliens.
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"[Meeting the Xenomorph] is like meeting a celebrity, isn't it?" Renaux added. "It's so surreal that they've been terrifying people for 45 years now."
Alien: Romulus tells the story of a group of young rebels leaving their miserable planet after discovering an abandoned research ship, called the Romulus, orbiting their world. However, once aboard the ship, they encounter a lot more than they bargained for.
Another creature featured in the series is the spider-like facehugger – a creepy crawly that latches onto a victim’s face and starts to lay its eggs. For Romulus, director Fede Álvarez – who previously reignited the Evil Dead franchise with his bloody 2013 remake of the original – had his crew create a remote-control facehugger for the actors to play against.
"Fede was the king of practical jokes because he had all these toys within his reach," Renaux said.
"We're all sitting in the tent in between scenes while they're setting up a shot and then this, facehugger comes crawling in and freaks us all out. Fede then comes in laughing with the controller, but they are really, genuinely quite creepy. Their legs move individually. It’s incredible."
The scope of the practical effects did not stop with just the creatures either; huge sets were created for the spaceship, including multiple long corridors for the cast to run down.
"It was like going to work and playing every day," Renaux fellow cast member Spike Fearn, last seen on screen in the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, said. "Everything was built. It was like a theme park."
Alien: Romulus is in cinemas now.
