Aileen Wu has admitted it was "really disgusting" filming her Facehugger scenes for ‘Alien: Romulus’.
Aileen Wu has admitted it was 'really disgusting' filming her Facehugger scenes for Alien: Romulus
The actress plays space coloniser Navarro in the sci-fi horror film where she is attacked by one of the parasitic lifeforms during the team’s exploration of an abandoned space station that holds a blood-thirsty Xenomorph and the actress has described her uncomfortable experience shooting scenes with the creature.
She told IndieWire: "It’s just that one profile shot, the f******* disgusting thing coming off out of my body. With the hugger itself, there was someone on the controllers maneuvering the fingers, so it was struggling while it was getting pulled off my face, and then there was someone doing the bit [in my throat], and then there was someone on lube duty because everything, every inch of that creature, was lubed up.
"That was really disgusting. Someone had a bucket for me, and would run in and have me spit out the lube and wash my mouth before we did the next take."
Wu said she knew shooting the sequence would be a "challenge physically" and revealed that director Fede Alvarez had done all he could to ensure the Facehuggers were as true to their previous appearances across the series.
She explained: "The scene where it was on my face and I’m just laying there, those were hard days, because I’m literally just laying there while the whole scene is taking place.
"The hardest part was matching my breathing with the creature’s bladders. Fede was very precise about that, he was like, ‘This one’s for the fans.'
"The hardcore fans are going to know the biology of this creature and how it sustains the process of laying that egg in you. It has to keep you breathing, so whenever the bladder is full on the creature, you have no breath. And when the bladders are empty, that’s when it’s giving you the breath."
After having the Facehuggers’ egg implanted into her, Navarro’s fate is sealed, and a Chestburster soon forcibly emerges from her chest.
Even if filming the scene of her character’s demise was hard, Wu stressed it was "very special" to have worked with the puppeteers who crafted these iconic sequences in the original ‘Alien’ movies.
She said: "The puppeteers were the team from Alec Gillis who worked on the first original ‘Alien’ films, and that was very special.
"So there were fake legs, because my actual body from the chest down was in a hole. They literally cut open the floor of the cockpit and built a bicycle chair situation for me to sit in it. My arms were my real arms, and then the prosthetic piece was attached at my collarbone."
Tagged in Fede Alvarez