Alien: Who The Original Movie’s POV Character Is (Not Ripley)

Sigourney Weaver may have made Ripley an iconic sci-fi protagonist in the original Alien, but which cast member was intended to be the POV character? When Ridley Scott’s Alien arrived in cinemas in 1979, the sci-fi horror hybrid was a massive success thanks to the unforgettably creepy design of HR Giger’s titular monster, the Xenomorph. However, the eponymous creature wasn’t the only element of Alien viewers were enamored with.

Relative unknown Sigourney Weaver went from obscurity to stardom overnight thanks to her main role as Ripley, the resourceful and resilient heroine of Alien. Tough, plucky, and relatable, Ripley was a heroine who soon proved central to the continuing box office success of the series despite the declining critical reception of later outings. However, Ripley wasn’t actually intended to be the character through whose eyes viewers experienced the story.

Although Weaver’s character was always the heroine of the film, according to Ridley Scott and the movie’s producers, Veronica Cartwright’s Lambert is intended to be the POV character for audiences. Interestingly, Lambert was more of a comic relief character in earlier drafts, and her stoic seriousness in the finished screenplay almost put Cartwright off accepting the role. Why the filmmakers viewed Lambert as the POV character of Alien may have something to do with her anxiety and fear, as she is one of few characters in the cast who reacts realistically to the movie’s life-or-death threat. Cartwright herself disliked this characterization, leading to a conversation with Scott who convinced her Lambert’s fear was necessary to give audiences a self-insert in the otherwise-stoic ensemble.

It was a clever call that later films in the series could have benefitted from, with the critically-panned Alien 3, for example, featuring few characters who weren’t prisoners that audiences had a hard time relating to. James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens circumvented this issue by making Ripley the more realistically scared central figure amongst a cast who have no idea what threat the Xenomorph poses. Later entries like the critically divisive Resurrection turned Ripley into a half-Xenomorph villain herself and offered little in the way of relatable characters among its cast of double-crossing criminals or amoral corporate scientists.

Most people would probably crumble pretty quickly if they were confronted by the Xenomorph in real life, and Lambert’s petrified response to the creature acted as a mirror for viewers. This makes Lambert offscreen demise all the more harrowing, since the character is simply too frozen by fear to either flee or defend herself. In one of Lambert’s many, unfilmed alternate Alien deaths, the character was supposed to hide in a locker and die from a heart attack, with her fear proving too much to bear.

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Cathal Gunning
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Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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