One of Tom Woodruff Jr.’s most abiding memories of playing an alien in the Alien movies is sitting alone in a dark corner of an empty set, deserted by the rest of the cast and crew, unable to take his elongated head off and go for lunch.
“It would be horrible,” says Woodruff, the creature effects artist and creature actor who has played various evolutions of the iconic xenomorph alien over the franchise’s long history. “I would just sit there in the dark and think, Oh, if I could just fall asleep. . .”
Bathroom breaks? Also not possible. “There was no opening that would allow, you know, easy access for a bathroom break,” he says, delicately. “Particularly since my hands were glued on, I wouldn’t want anybody else. . . doing it for me. I just don’t have that kind of, um, I don’t have that affection with anybody else, that I would trust to do that, just the right way.”
Nothing has terrorized moviegoers quite like the hellacious space cockroach that came to be known as the xenomorph, first unleashed in 1979. Its adult form is the grotesque embodiment of a nightmare—serpentine, skeletal, sexual—that makes other movie monsters look as cuddlesome as Care Bears. The creature is so terrifyingly effective that it’s easy to forget that, a lot of the time, it’s really just a guy in a suit.
Different guys at different times, of course. In the first film, the xenomorph was played by Bolaji Badejo, a 6’10’’ Nigerian graphic design student who’d been picked up in a pub in London’s Soho. Basketball players, mime artists, gymnasts and acrobats have all been considered for alien parts, as well as actor Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca in Star Wars) and leggy German model Veruschka von Lehndorff.
Woodruff has spent more time inhabiting the aliens of the Alien movies than anyone else. Under legendary effects guru Stan Winston, he worked on the creature costume designs for James Cameron’s sequel Aliens, then graduated to playing the various iterations of the creatures themselves in the subsequent films Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.
Woodruff is an outspoken advocate for the tangible presence of a person in a creature suit. He has much less interest in the CG-generated equivalent. “The audience can just feel it, if is a creature is there in the room. And, someone in a creature suit—there are layers to that. It’s a character. If there aren’t layers to it, it gets very dull pretty quick.”
Creature acting is a calling that requires a certain amount of dedication, and Woodruff has a remarkable capacity to tolerate indignity and discomfort. For David Fincher’s sordid Alien 3, aside from already being imprisoned in the suit, Woodruff recalls being covered in insects.
“I remember the feeling. I had to be completely motionless, and they were climbing all around, getting stuck in the slime on the suit. Several somehow made their way down the back and into the suit. That was probably one of the most difficult things, to remain completely still while that was going on.”
But then again, he says, “I will endure almost anything.”
In the upcoming Alien: Covenant, the lead alien is played by Sydney-based dancer Andrew Crawford, with some CG assistance. One Australian dance critic has described Crawford, who has performed with the world’s leading ballet and dance companies, as having “the wingspan and majesty of a golden eagle”—and, with eerie prescience, as resembling a specimen from another planet.
Even so, for Crawford, playing an extra-terrestrial killing machine was quite a departure from dancing to Rameau and Rachmaninov. He was required to speedily navigate cylindrical spaceship corridors while wearing stilt-like carbon-fiber running blades, like the ones worn by Olympian Oscar Pistorius, as well as that giant animatronic head. “You can’t really see a lot or hear much, which can be quite confronting,” he says. “You can’t really be claustrophobic.”
He adds, with a laugh, “Really, the trick was staying on your feet. Trying not to bang your head and all the rest of it. And if you build up velocity”—on those foot-high feet blades—“you can’t stop right away. I nearly flew out of the spaceship into the camera.”
Crawford got the impression that his personal comfort—and his breathing—weren’t always a top priority for the creature department. “Sometimes it was quite shocking. I did think, perhaps I can’t do this? But of course, you can’t not do it, because it’s too wonderful an opportunity. And you don’t want to be the guy that lets Ridley Scott down.”
Rewatching the earlier films and developing the movement vocabulary of the alien was important, he says. But on the other hand, “the physical presence of this thing is just so remarkable that in a sense a lot of the work is done for you. It’s just so compelling and awe-inspiring a thing that in a sense the trick is to not get in the way of that.”
H.R. Giger designed and created the original xenomorph costume, expanding on his own phallic, vaginal, biomechanical artwork. The Swiss artist had a diabolical imagination—he was nicknamed Count Dracula on set, and had the kind of mind that perceived mechanical-erotic undertones in the anatomy of a garbage truck—but he was no creature suit designer.
Giger fashioned the suit a bit like a wizard improvising a potion, building up textures out of such incongruous objects as oysters, bones, bottle caps, car parts and pieces of macaroni. The head piece was built around a real human skull. The feet were just painted Converse sneakers. (Scott, who had his own eccentric ideas, experimented with pouring maggots into the xenomorph’s translucent cranium, abandoning the idea when they refused to perform as required.)
Later, when Woodruff and his fellow professional creature artists got involved, the suits became more streamlined. When he played the alien, Woodruff wore a black foam rubber leotard beneath a foam rubber suit, with separate hands and feet worn like gloves and shoes. (The Alien 3 costume had separate shoulder pieces, cast in polyester fiberglass, for a hard, bug-like surface to match the dome of the head.)
The tail, also made of foam rubber, was only worn when it would be visible on camera. It was attached to Woodruff’s hips via belt, allowing him to swing it back and forth by sassily gyrating his hips.
Most of the discomfort and weirdness of playing the xenomorph resulted from the enormous articulated alien head, made of fiberglass. Plastic tubes ran up the length of Woodruff’s back, up the neck and to the lips, which allowed the creature to salivate on cue.
Bolaji likened wearing his head piece in the first Alien to having his head stuck up a huge banana. At least his head piece was removable; the alien performers that came after him didn’t have that luxury. Woodruff’s was cinched down tightly to a custom skull cap that was glued and blended to the chest, so that the join was invisible. He spent six to eight hours at a time like this, his head trapped inside the xenomorph’s, seeing and breathing through slits and crevices hidden behind the creature’s two-foot jaw. (On Alien: Covenant, at least, the creatures department figured out a way to supply Crawford with water, through a tube.)
Finally, Woodruff was slathered in a cellulose slime—actually a food-thickening agent. “Someone told us it was the same material used to thicken milkshakes at fast food restaurants.” The slime acted like anti-freeze, sapping his body heat, resulting in one especially horrible winter shoot in Vancouver for Alien vs. Predator. “It was raining, and the water was freezing all around me. That one really kicked my ass.”
The whole process of getting into the suit would take around an hour, with the assistance of three or four people—and it took about as long and as many helpers to get out.
It would be difficult not to feel like a prop or human mannequin as a xenomorph, you’d think. But Woodruff fondly remembers Sigourney Weaver going out of her way to treat him as a fellow performer and the creature as a co-star.
“Sigourney was so great about it,” Woodruff says. “That was really important to me, because up until then I just saw myself as a guy in a suit. She gave me that validation, and it allowed me to treat it with respect. And that’s the way it’s been ever since.”
As well as keeping one of her original Alien outfits as a memento, Weaver has collected articles and essays that speculate wildly on the symbolic, mythic significance of the xenomorph. “That’s one of the reasons the film has traction—because it’s not just this thing,” she says. “It has this malevolence that’s beyond reality. And it seems to know more than we want to give it credit for. I think each of us as actors loaded the alien with other meaning for ourselves.”
It’s a depth of meaning, Woodruff says, that you just don’t get with CG. “It’s the simplicity of a guy in a monster suit. That should never be lost.”
