Ridley Scott Cut A Steamy Scene From Alien's Script At Sigourney Weaver's Request
The wildest thing about the "Alien" franchise is just how much of its success seems to have come about at least partially by accident, or by improvisation. By the second movie, Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley had been firmly established as the face of the franchise, as well as one of the most beloved sci-fi leads of all time, but in the original script for "Alien," her character wasn't even supposed to be a woman. Even after Ripley's gender was flipped, the decision to let her survive had little to do with feminism or making Ripley into a franchise lead, but just with subverting expectations. "No one on that film was a feminist," Sigourney Weaver said in a 2006 interview with Total Film. "Everyone thought, 'Who will ever think the woman is gonna be the survivor?' So it was just one big gag."
There's a common fun fact thrown around about "Alien" that all the characters were written in the script as gender-neutral, which is partially true, but there was so much rewriting and recutting throughout production that this definitely wasn't the case for all of it. That's why, at one point at least, there was a sex scene in the script between Ripley and Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt). The point of it was to provide "relief for crewmates after the death of Kane (John Hurt)," according to Roger Luckhurst's book on "Alien," but Weaver herself wasn't impressed by it.
'I don't know, this love scene'
Echoing her comments from 2006, Weaver likened Walter Hill and David Geiler's "Alien" script draft to Agatha Christie's classic murder mystery novel "And Then There Were None" during a 2022 interview with Marc Maron for his "WTF" podcast. As the writers saw it, "'We'll just make the girl the survivor because no one in their wildest dreams will think it's gonna end up being the girl,'" Weaver explained. She also recalled that 20th Century Fox didn't necessarily want to cast her due to her unknown status at the time, but she "just got really lucky" that director Ridley Scott and the film's producers felt otherwise.
Speaking of Scott, she didn't refrain from letting him know how she felt about the Ripley-Dallas sex scene during their initial meeting. As she recounted to Maron:
"I met Ridley, I was wearing these huge hooker boots that made me too tall to even be in this room with you, Marc. And, you know, I don't know what kind of thing I looked like when I walked in but anyway, we had a great talk about the script that I was pretty critical of. I said, 'Eh, it's pretty bleak. I don't know, this love scene, would you really get it on while this thing is running around?' Anyway, we had a good talk."
Although the scene was reportedly one of Scott's favorites, he eventually cut it, and most fans would agree this was probably for the best.
Contributing to a cold, efficient script
There are a lot of explanations for why cutting the sex scene made for a wise decision, but the main result is that Ripley really does feel like a character whose gender is essentially irrelevant to the story. There are some small moments that feel informed by the fact that she's a woman, like how the other crew members don't take her advice in the first half as seriously as they should, but most of those could still be explained away by the specifics of Ripley's status on the crew. She starts the movie off as third in command, and it's only after Dallas's death that she rises as the main authority figure in the group. In the version of the movie we got, the apparent affection we get from Ripley and Dallas can also simply be explained as platonic respect, nothing more.
One potential downside to cutting the scene, however, is just that it takes away another opportunity for us to get to know the characters better before the Xenomorph kills off 90% of them. "Alien" is a great movie with a fun, atmospheric plot, but one side effect of the bold dwindling of its cast is that most of the characters don't stick out as much as they probably should have. Is Dallas or Kane really anyone's favorite "Alien" character? They both get a few good character-building moments for fans to pick up on during rewatches, but for casual viewers, they're both gone too soon to properly make an impression. Dallas didn't need a sex scene with Ripley to have a bigger impact on the franchise, but an extra scene or two of him before his death would've gone a long way.