Alien: Romulus spoilers follow.
Alien: Romulus director Fede Alvarez has explained how and why a familiar face from the original Alien made a surprising return in the latest movie.
Although promoted as a standalone project, the latest movie in the franchise features quite a few tie-ins to Ridley Scott’s beloved first movie and divisive prequels Prometheus and Covenant.
Look away now if you haven’t seen Alien: Romulus as major spoilers follow.
Related: Best movie box sets to buy
During the events of Romulus, the film’s characters run across a talking torso named Rook, who bares a striking resemblance to android Ash (played by Ian Holm in the original Alien). He turns out to be just as untrustworthy, too.
In the Alien universe, the synthetics are based on a handful of models, meaning actors like Michael Fassbender can play multiple roles. However, Ash actor Ian Holm died in 2020, so here we’ve got a mix of an animatronic, CGI, and the on-set performance of actor Daniel Betts.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Alvarez explained why he wanted Holm’s likeness in the film, stating: “Historically, there’s just a limited amount of synthetics, and that’s why some come back a few times. So we were talking, and Ridley and I felt like the one that has never been back was the best one of them all, the original model played by Ian Holm.
“The whole thing started with me calling the estate and talking with his widow. She felt that Ian was given the cold shoulder by Hollywood in the last years of his life, that he would’ve loved to be part of more projects after The Hobbit, but he wasn’t. So she was thrilled about the idea of having him back.
Related: How to get cheap cinema tickets
“As soon as we finished the rough version, the first thing I did was a call with all his family to make sure they were the first ones that saw it.
“It was a very, very emotional call. They lost him not too long ago, and I lost my dad, too, around the same time. So I could relate to their pain and also their excitement to see him back in the movie.
“I’m super proud of how we did it and how we worked with them. I can’t wait for the fans to lose their minds at seeing one of their favorite faces from the original.”
Alien: Romulus is out in cinemas now. Previous films are available on Disney+.
Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer and resident Welsh person at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016.Â
In his time he’s covered a host of live events, interviewed celebrities big and small and crowbarred a countless amount of great/awful (delete as appropriate) puns into articles.Â
A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe’s main interest is in video gaming. Although particularly a PlayStation gamer, he plays across Xbox, Nintendo and PC/Steam Deck, and likes to keep tabs on many games he’s not got the time to play.
Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I’m a Fish (which you really should do).