Actor Sigourney Weaver got choked up after a reporter linked her most famous role, as Ellen Ripley in the Alien series, to the rise of Vice President Kamala Harris, now the official Democratic presidential nominee.
Weaver, who was in Italy to accept the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Film Festival, got emotional after a reporter asked about how the character of Ripley contributed to the empowerment of women, including Harris herself.
The reporter asked:
"To what extent can movies, cinema make it possible that a woman like Kamala Harris can become President of the United States?"
Weaver responded:
"I love that question because we're all so excited about Kamala and to think for one moment that my work would have anything to do with her rise makes me very happy, actually, because it’s true. I have so many women who come and thank me."
Weaver teared up and joked about needing "my vodka" as she reached for her water bottle, adding:
"It's been difficult since 2016 and we’re all very grateful about her. What I appreciated about what [writers] Walter Hill and David Giler wrote and how [director Ridley Scott] put it together was that my character was a person, not a woman, and they're two of the very few writers who can write a script where it's just a person."
"If you don't have to see her being girly or womanly or any of these other ideas, which are all great [because] women can be everything, but I got to play really what I realize now [was] the everyperson part. She's all of us."
"She is what you become when you have to find the ingenuity and don't even have time to be brave or anything else and I think of the women all over the world who are on the front lines of climate change and all these crises: It's the women who are taking care of their families, of their children, who are often doing the work. They're on the front lines."
"I take my inspiration from what I see as an actual woman. We were not getting our due and to me women were always so capable. We are everything so the idea the film world was using the pie and we were like this [raising and widening her arms], Walter and David loved strong women, felt women were strong."
She concluded:
"That's the funny thing. I'm always asked why I play strong women and I always think, 'What a weird question' because I just play women. Women are strong and they don't give up."
"You want to know why? We can't. We have to do it."
You can hear what she said in the video below.
Many concurred, expressing appreciation for Weaver's work in addition to her words.
Weaver also spoke about her experience aging in the business.
The actor, 74, noted that at some point, higher-ups "decided somehow that older women could actually play interesting characters and started writing a lot of older women characters."
“Suddenly, we stopped being a joke and a mother-in-law, and we started to be real people because actually a lot of our audience are real people," she observed, expressing her appreciation for roles for women in Italian cinema.
Weaver, who most recently had major roles in Avatar: The Way of Water and the acclaimed miniseries The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, will appear in the next Avatar sequel, furthering her contributions to science fiction films. She also has a significant role in the upcoming The Mandalorian & Grogu, a space Western that adds to the storyline of the Disney+ television series The Mandalorian.
