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Sigourney Weaver Pretended She Was Doing Shakespeare While Shooting Alien

Sigourney Weaver at Opening Night Post Curtain Call Cast Photos for
Sigourney Weaver. Photo: Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan

In Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Sigourney Weaver plays a Hollywood actress who dates a hunky 29-year-old. So when we spoke to her at Monday’s opening at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, we asked for her take on Hollywood cougars. “Do you think it really happens a lot?” she asked. “I think it’s quite rare. Well, you’re a young man. Tell me what’s going on …” She then swiveled her head to the right and laid eyes on her husband. “I’m married to a younger man — seven years younger,” she said, before engaging him in the conversation. “Am I a cougar, sweetie? Am I a cougar?” He wrinkled his face as if to say, Don’t ask me, and she instead began to analyze her character in the show. “You know, I don’t think Masha thinks of herself as a cougar,” she said. “I think she thinks she and Spike are really in love. I think she thinks this is a real thing — it doesn’t matter how old we are.” As for her character’s career regrets (Masha’s starred in serial killer movies but not Three Sisters), Weaver says that the 1979 version of herself would have related to that storyline: “You know, when I was doing Alien — because I was such a snob, so I didn’t really want to do science fiction — I just pretended I was doing Henry V the entire time. I thought, Well, as a woman, I’ll never be cast as Henry V, so this is my Henry V.”

Sigourney Weaver Channeled Shakespeare For Alien