What Sold Tom Skerritt on the Alien Script
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Tom Skerritt, the Emmy-winning actor who played the doomed captain in Alien, has died at 93.
In Alien, he is the beleaguered captain of the Nostromo, crouched in a dark, claustrophobic duct, hunting the alien with a sputtering flamethrower.
He told the Seattle Times that what appealed to him in the script was that the lead actor disappeared and the woman becomes the hero.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Take
The clever bit is that the captain is set up as the film's authority figure and then removed, so the woman becoming the hero feels like a structural decision rather than a last-minute twist.
Pushback
There is a colder reading: the captain is doomed, and the story hands the hero role to the woman. Efficient, but a little cynical.