This is turning out to be quite a day for Alien news. Following the new casting on Noah Hawley’s FX prequel series, we now have some details on Fede Alvarez’s movie, Alien: Romulus. And the info comes straight from the film’s star, Cailee Spaeny, who reveals when the story actually takes place.
Spaeny, who was at last night’s Gotham Awards for her role in Priscilla, spoke with Variety about Alien: Romulus, and revealed the show takes place between the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens.
“It’s supposed to slot in between the first movie and the second movie,” Spaeny said. “They brought the same team from ‘Aliens,’ the James Cameron film. The same people who built those xenomorphs actually came on and built ours. So getting to see the original design with the original people who have been working on these films for 45-plus years and has been so much of their life has been really incredible.”
There had been rumors Spaeny was playing a grown-up Newt, the human girl discovered by Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley aboard the Nostromo spaceship. Clearly that won’t be the case.
However, there are 57 years of time that passes between the two movies. Ripley is in cryo-sleep, and we don’t have a ton of info about what happens during this time period. That leaves Alvarez with wide latitude as to the stories he can tell with Alien: Romulus.
