Sigourney Weaver Goes Her Own Way
Sigourney Weaver
Delivering performances both profound and eccentric, the actress has refused to be pinned down or defined throughout her nearly half-century career. At 71, she’s still going her own (mischievous) way.
THE PERFORMANCE THAT best summarizes Sigourney Weaver isn’t one of the many in which she hurtled through the cosmos in androgynous outfits and questionable haircuts with an ill-tempered brood of extraterrestrial lizards in pursuit. It isn’t the time she pretended to be an ape so that gorillas would trust her or to be human so that Melanie Griffith would. It isn’t when she was thrown in the slammer or possessed by a ghost or nearly garroted by Harry Connick Jr., of all people, in a public restroom, of all places.
It’s when Stephen Colbert came for her. In a skit on “The Late Show” in April 2017, he sat imperiously at a reception desk in a doctor’s office on some far-flung space station, and Weaver, dressed as that lizard-evading star-trekker in the “Alien” movies, rushed in.
“The xenomorphs!” she yelled. “They’ve breached their containment facility!” One of the creatures, she added, was stuck inside her.
“That really sounds like a conversation for your ob-gyn,” Colbert replied.
Frustrated, she explained that she was Ellen Ripley, “the woman who single-handedly saved humanity every five to eight years for the last three decades.” And, she warned: “I can feel this thing about to burst out of my chest!”
“Ma’am,” Colbert deadpanned, “I had a burrito for lunch, and I don’t want to tell you where that’s about to burst out.”
With what must have been a herculean effort, Weaver kept a straight face. Instead of following Colbert’s lead and winking at the audience, she treated them to a complete reanimation of her celluloid alter ego from a series of sci-fi classics that introduced a whole new archetype: the female action hero. Here was Ripley in all her customary urgency, all her apocalyptic dread, as if Weaver’s involvement in the “Alien” franchise hadn’t ended with its fourth chapter in 1997 and these breezy minutes on a cheesy set with goofy props were its fifth.
She wasn’t on Colbert’s show to promote some new project. She had no larger agenda, no careerist scheme. She was just there for the weird adventure of it. That’s the essence — the wonder — of Weaver: She’s always there, with total commitment, for the weird adventure of it. She says yes to one oddball dare after another. Then she takes the plunge.
And, despite the cliché, “plunge” is the right word. In “Avatar 2,” which is largely finished but not scheduled for release until December 2022 — to be followed by several planned sequels — she shot many of her scenes underwater. Never mind that she was closing in on 70. (She’s now 71.) Or that the preparation included dives in Key West, Fla., and in Hawaii, where she reclined on the ocean floor while manta rays glided over her. Or that she needed to train with an expert who had coached elite military divers so that she could hold her breath, after a big gulp of supplemental oxygen, for more than six minutes. That made the part more attractive to her. “My hope is that what I receive from the universe is even more outrageous than anything I can think of,” she told me. “I don’t really say to myself, ‘Well, you can’t do this.’ Or, ‘You can’t do that.’ Let me at it! And we’ll see.”
There are female screen actors of her generation who are better at melancholy (Sissy Spacek), madness (Sally Field) or malice (Glenn Close). There are a few, including Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep, with a larger gallery of legendary roles. But are there any more exuberantly and eccentrically game than Weaver, who took her mix of regal beauty and formal training — she studied at Yale’s graduate drama school in the mid-1970s alongside Streep — in such wildly surprising directions?
THERE’S AN UNDERAPPRECIATED current of mischief in Weaver that’s manifest in an eye-catching detail in her midtown Manhattan apartment, where we met for a long, socially distanced conversation this past summer. In a grand multipurpose room that provides excellent views of the East River, between a proper dining-room table and an elegant arrangement of couches, dangles a swing: a thick wood bench attached by ropes to the high ceiling. It’s a declaration that she doesn’t take herself too seriously, and to review her filmography — more than 50 movies over nearly 45 years, beginning with a fleeting, mute appearance on Woody Allen’s arm in “Annie Hall” in 1977 — is to realize that it says the exact same thing.
Between “Alien” in 1979 and “Aliens” in 1986, she did a French-language comedy, “One Woman or Two,” which co-starred Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the famous sex therapist. She did a poltergeist comedy, “Ghostbusters,” which co-starred Bill Murray and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. (That’s when she was possessed.)
Serious roles, silly roles, roles steeped in romance, roles drenched in sweat: She set no trajectory. Established no pattern. Even at her commercial peak, she took minor roles, as in “Working Girl,” in 1988, which gave her a fraction of the screen time of Griffith and Harrison Ford. That performance led to an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress in the same year that she was nominated for best actress for her portrayal of the doomed primatologist Dian Fossey in “Gorillas in the Mist.” Her co-stars in “Gorillas” were the silverback mountain gorillas of Rwanda, where much of the movie was shot. She just plopped herself down in the jungle among them. “Of course, I had to pay attention,” she said, “as the babies were climbing all over me and urinating on me and pulling my hair. I was very careful never to touch them with my human hands, because the mothers, although they looked like they were eating and not paying attention, would have been right over there.” The experience made her a passionate conservationist and environmentalist, and she beams at the memory. “It was the closest thing to absolute joy that I’ve ever felt on the planet — just to be with them. They’re so grounded, compared to us. They have such smart priorities: eating, sleeping, copulating.”
Her other best actress nomination came two years earlier, for the sequel “Aliens,” which also put her through paces well beyond the norm. “It was a tough shoot, physically,” said James Cameron, who wrote and directed it. “She was running around this complicated set, and there were valves and handles sticking out, and she’d crack into them with her arm or shoulder or hip. I remember her just being black-and-blue after a couple of weeks.” That’s why Cameron, who later recruited her for 2009’s “Avatar,” didn’t have to worry that she would balk at the soggy challenges of “Avatar 2.” She balks at nothing.
The reason isn’t some innate confidence. It’s because she felt pulled — actually, pushed is more like it — along an unorthodox path. It’s because she had something to prove. And it’s because she’s tall.
“I WAS THIS tall when I was 11,” she told me, meaning about an inch shy of six feet. “Like a giant spider.” She was Susan Weaver then, and her parents actually sent her to a doctor for tests. “I think they were afraid I’d just keep growing,” she said. She didn’t, but her height defined her, then and forevermore, as someone who spilled over the edges, who was bold by dint of biology and had no choice but to chart an outsize course. Small wonder that she later ditched Susan in favor of Sigourney, after a character in “The Great Gatsby.” She needed a less diminutive name.
She grew up in Manhattan, where her father was a television executive, and went to boarding school in Connecticut before earning an English degree from Stanford and then attending Yale. Her acting teachers there told her that she was talentless, then amended that verdict slightly. “They said, ‘We take it back, but you can only do comedy — don’t ever try to do any drama,’” she recalled.
And so she did comedy — and absurdist comedy at that, acting in the Off Broadway productions of the playwright Christopher Durang, a close friend from graduate school. She told me that to understand her loopy assignments later on, I just had to understand her loopy assignments then, such as “Titanic,” a Durang one-act where she says she got her “confidence back through playing a multiple schizophrenic who keeps a hedgehog in her vagina.” After that, she said, anything else “seemed pretty tame.”
Movie agents would come to check her out onstage and deem her too statuesque to be easily cast. But eventually, she got auditions, including for “Alien,” which she didn’t recognize as a future blockbuster. Her attitude when she met its director, Ridley Scott, then a novice with only one prior movie under his belt, was skeptical. “I was wearing trousers with hooker boots that went over my knees, and I think they were at least three inches high,” she said. “Why I was doing that, I don’t know. Maybe I thought it was science fiction-y.” Scott asked her for her opinion about the script. “Very bleak,” she answered, adding that a sex scene (later cut) was utterly implausible.
But Scott was intrigued. “And he pulled out these extraordinary black-and-white renderings of the alien in all of his erotic elegance,” she said. “I realized that I’d never seen anything like this on the screen. It was so beautiful and so menacing. From that moment, I was hooked.”
“Alien” made her a star, and she soon found herself opposite Mel Gibson in 1982’s “The Year of Living Dangerously.” Although he’s shorter than she is, “when we went to the opening in Los Angeles, he encouraged me to wear the highest heels I could,” she recalled, sharing the story because it was so exceptional. Many male actors, producers and directors conspicuously sat down the second she entered a room, lest they find themselves standing beside her and failing to measure up.
She wavered on doing a sequel to “Alien.” Then she read Cameron’s “Aliens” script. He’d constructed the entire story around Ripley and taken the character to a new level. In “Alien,” she’s merely the lone survivor of the crew that’s picked off, one by one, by a monster that she finally dispenses with at the end, as she heads home to Earth. But in the sequel, she leads a platoon of warriors back into space to check on colonists who may have met the same fate as her former crew. It’s as much a war movie as anything else, with a woman as the general, and her gender isn’t the chink in her armor. It’s the very metal, giving her a humility and humanity missing in some of the men around her. That idea, coupled with Weaver’s ardent and un-self-conscious performance, made “Aliens” a feminist milestone. Weaver has served as a sort of cinematic godmother to Angelina Jolie in the “Tomb Raider” series, Jennifer Lawrence in “The Hunger Games” movies and many others.
And she conveyed motherhood so well that Cameron was able to take it out of the movie. When he wrote and shot “Aliens,” there were scenes that establish that Ripley had a daughter who died while the character was off floating in space in a state of age-arresting stasis. That heartbreak is supposed to explain her fierce protectiveness of a little girl that the platoon later discovers on the decimated colony. But while editing the movie, Cameron realized that Weaver had utterly sold that bond independent of any back story, so he cut those early scenes.
It was while making “Aliens” that she began to think a lot more about becoming a mother herself, and a few years later, she and her husband, the theater director Jim Simpson, had their daughter, Charlotte, who’s now 30. Weaver slowed down a bit, putting her career in a family-centered gear not uncommon among actresses of her generation, some of whom, like Spacek and Debra Winger, never really revved all the way up to full speed again, while others, like Streep and Weaver, with their formal training in theater, snapped back into trouper mode. For Weaver, the break wasn’t hard or unusual: From the start, she had come and gone as she pleased, never settling on a fixed image, never lingering for long in Hollywood. She spent extensive time with her family in a remote residence on more than 400 acres deep in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains that she bought in 1986.
“She goes on long hikes and is never happier than when she’s swimming in the lake, in spite of the snapping turtles,” said Selina Cadell, an English actress and director who has been a close friend of hers for more than 40 years. The image of Weaver imprinted in Cadell’s brain is from the day they met in London, where Weaver joined her and a mutual friend of theirs at an outdoor pub. “I saw this very gazelle-like creature leaping through the traffic in a rather dangerous way,” Cadell told me, “and the next thing I know, she’d leapt over the wall and was sitting beside us. And I was so impressed — with her exuberance and her folly all at once. I thought, ‘This is an interesting woman.’”
Determinedly so. Both her height and that criticism from Yale — which clearly haunted her, because she circled back to it in our conversations — left her feeling like an outsider unsuited to or unworthy of certain assignments, such as the romantic leads then typically reserved for shorter or blonder actresses. But she simultaneously longed to show, with an array of other assignments, how suited and worthy she could be, in her own way: “to play all kinds of parts of women who were different, who didn’t fit in,” she said. And she wasn’t about to pass on something because it was too commercial or too much of a genre piece, not if there was something reasonably intriguing there for her. She was never going to be pretentious.
THE ACTOR Kevin Kline, with whom she has made three movies, told me that their long friendship is fueled in part by the gratitude each of them feels for the other’s ego-lancing teasing. During their first screen collaboration, the 1993 White House comedy “Dave,” she furtively positioned various members of the crew behind him and had pictures taken of them reacting to him by yawning or dozing off. “She put together this photo album — the amount of work that went into it was extraordinary,” Kline said. “I’ve never quite witnessed anything like it. It was an extravagant practical joke.”
‘I’ve been very lucky, in a way, starting out in this business by playing a woman who runs around with a flamethrower.’
But that same unstuffy sensibility meant that she often didn’t go after — or get — some of the flashy Oscar bait that peers did. When I first met and interviewed her in 1994, she confessed that she sometimes complained to her agent, who also represented Streep: “I want an ‘Out of Africa.’ I want a ‘Sophie’s Choice.’” “But I never did anything about it,” she told me back then. “I always felt a little bit illegitimate. Whenever they talked about serious actresses, I always felt that I had one foot in the land of Arnold Schwarzenegger, one foot in the land of Ivan Reitman and maybe a toe in the land of Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.”
Funnily, she was then promoting the movie “Death and the Maiden,” in which she had the starring role — a torture survivor who takes her alleged torturer captive — that Close had played in the stage version on Broadway. “Death” belonged to a string of movies in the 1990s that suggested an uptick in Weaver’s confidence. If Streep and Close have allowed themselves to become more playful over time, Weaver allowed herself to become a little more serious. She was a mesmerizingly icy adulteress in 1997’s “The Ice Storm,” in which she and Kline teamed again, and a woman wrongly imprisoned for child abuse in 1999’s “A Map of the World,” the movie of hers that she most wishes more people had seen. These characters, like previous ones, were outsiders, but of a more somber, less flamboyant sort. She by no means jettisoned the old mischief, and mixed in with her smaller, quirkier movies in the 1990s and 2000s was crowd-pleasing fare (such as “Copycat,” the 1995 thriller that paired her with Connick Jr.) and comedies (the 1999 cult favorite “Galaxy Quest,” which parodied the sci-fi genre that made her a superstar).
If anything, the eclecticism that defined Weaver’s career from the start has grown more pronounced. Over the past decade, she has done Broadway (Durang’s modern-day Chekhov spoof “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” which premiered in 2012) and cable television (“Political Animals,” that same year, in which she played a secretary of state with shades of Hillary Clinton). In film, she has straddled genres as diverse as horror and animation. She has toes everywhere, even the most unexpected crannies. She’s done cameos on the English television comedy “Doc Martin” and the French television comedy “Call My Agent!” She has played or poked fun at herself in “SpongeBob SquarePants” and on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee.” The idiosyncratic nature of her career, she told me, has made aging easier, because her parts never depended on dewiness. And she never encountered the sexual harassment or humiliation that so many actresses have come forward to describe. She was Ripley, after all. “I’ve been very lucky, in a way, starting out in this business by playing a woman who runs around with a flamethrower,” she said.
She was lucky, too, that she got into the business back then, because actors’ brands are now so much more narrowly defined and so much more painstakingly maintained, their presence on social media absorbing as much strategic thought as their actual professional development. Weaver — and, as it happens, Kline — represent an entirely different ethos, a compulsion to stretch in this direction because you last stretched in another one, an understanding that variety is the handmaiden to longevity — or at least to longevity in a happy, mentally healthy state.
She has three movies tentatively scheduled for release later this year or early next. There’s “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” about which she’s permitted to say exactly nothing; “My Salinger Year,” in which her supporting turn as J.D. Salinger’s literary agent recalls Streep’s “Devil” minus the “Prada”; and “The Good House,” in which she plays a successful small-town realtor who becomes involved with a local handyman (Kline, again) as her closet alcoholism finally catches up with her.
She has to be almost as mum about “Avatar 2” as about the next “Ghostbusters,” so she couldn’t say why the action is so aqueous. But she volunteered that she and other members of the cast had to learn not to squint or clamp their mouths shut — both natural reactions when you’re submerged — during take after take in a gigantic water tank. She had weights around her waist and professional divers who sped her back to the surface for air at brief, regular intervals.
I asked her: “You never said, during filming, ‘This is insane’?”
“I had some concerns,” she replied. “But that’s what the training was for. And I really wanted to do it. I didn’t want anyone to think, ‘Oh, she’s old, she can’t do this.’”
Is there anywhere left for any of Weaver’s toes to go? She excitedly mentioned a planned movie based on a 2014 play by Brian Watkins, “My Daughter Keeps Our Hammer.” “I play a very obstreperous mother whose best friend is a sheep,” she said. The two of them watch soap operas together.
Let other stars do starrier stuff. They miss out on the xenomorphs, the livestock and the laughs. And in the end, they don’t walk any taller.
Styled by Jason Rider. Hair by Serge Normant at Statement Artists using Serge Normant. Makeup by Brigitte Reiss-Andersen at A-Frame using Dior Beauty. Set design by Stefan Beckman at Exposure NY. Production: Prodn. Manicure: Megumi Yamamoto for Susan Price NYC. Digital tech: Nick Brinley. Photo assistants: Alex Hopkins, Peter Duong and Nicholas Krasznai. Set assistant: Emma Magidson. Tailor: Carol Ai. Stylist’s assistant: Zane Li.
