As a film set between the events of Alien and Aliens, Alien: Romulus features callbacks to the past and future events in the franchise. To pull off one of those callbacks, director Fede Alvarez had to use a mixture of A.I., animatronics, and CGI to digitally resurrect an actor from the past in a new role. Now, Alvarez is defending his choice to do so.
Warning: the following contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus. If you haven’t seen the movie or don’t want to know what happens, stop reading now.
Relatively early in the film, Romulus introduces a new synthetic android, Rook, who has the face and voice of the late Alien actor Ian Holm, who passed away in 2020. In the first film, Holm portrayed a different synthetic named Ash. While speaking with the Los Angeles Times, Alvarez said that he got the approval of his idea from Holm’s widow, Sophie de Stempel, and from Ridley Scott, who directed Alien and knew Holm throughout his life.
“We knew we were going to create an animatronic,” recalled Alvarez. “And that later we were going to do CGI enhancements in the mouth and in the eyes depending on the shots. Then the question arose, ‘What face does it have? Who is it?’ … The only one who hadn’t reappeared and who we found fascinating was Ian Holm.”
Daniel Betts portrayed Rook on set and performed facial capture opposite the cast. After filming Rook’s scenes, A.I. was used on Betts’ voice to make it sound like Holm.
“We’re not bringing someone back to life and saying, ‘Ian would have done it that way,'” added Alvarez. “He would have obviously done it differently. We had an actor who was on the set, who worked on the dialogue, who worked with the actors. It’s not like we skipped hiring an actor.”
Alvarez also mentioned that going this route was more expensive than simply hiring an actor for the role, but he has no regrets about the tribute to Holm.
“In the last 10 years after The Hobbit, Ian Holm felt like Hollywood had turned its back on him and his widow felt he would have loved to be a part of this,” said Alvarez. “He loved this character in particular.”
Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters.
