Alien Romulus confirms it: this actress is one of the big revelations of 2024 – Cinema News

When she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival in September 2023, Cailee Spaeny was not exactly a beginner. Because it had been five years since the public had had several opportunities to see her: in Bad Times at the El Royale, Vice, Pacific Rim 2, the (failed) reboot of The Craft or the series Devs by Alex Garland.

More or less successful works, but which do not allow the American, born on July 24, 1998, to really emerge. Until Sofia Coppola, who has never made the slightest mistake in terms of casting, chose her to play in Priscilla, a biopic dedicated to Elvis Presley's wife.

Once again, the director of Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation was right. And, by leading Cailee Spaeny to this Venice award (and then a Golden Globe nomination), she made her one of the faces to follow next year, as two major projects loom.

In France, it is she who opens the ball and the cinema year, since Priscilla is released in our theaters on January 3, 2024. It will ultimately attract a little less than 300,000 spectators, which makes it one of the lowest scores of its director in France, but Cailee Spaeny is unanimous and the public is starting to remember her name.

“Cailee has a very expressive face and an extraordinary ability to transform herself according to the different stages of life that she must embody”says Sofia Coppola of her actress. “She was able to play a fifteen-year-old girl in the morning and in the same day play a pregnant twenty-year-old woman at Graceland. Cailee has an ability to make you share her emotions that is both very beautiful and a little mysterious.”

A notion of transformation that we find at the heart of the roles she plays in the two following films: Civil War by Alex Garland, alongside Kirsten Dunst, former muse of Sofia Coppola who recommended her to the director for Priscilla, shot after this opus. And Alien: Romulus, new episode of the much-loved science fiction and horror saga.

Cailee has a very expressive face and an extraordinary ability to transform herself according to the different stages of life that she must embody.

Three feature films in which his character enters a universe (the world of Elvis, the daily life of war reporters on the ground in an America in flames and blood, a space station in which no one will hear him scream) where he will be forced to toughen up and grow up in rapid succession to overcome the trials in his path.

With its Xenomorph, its Facehuggers and all that implies in terms of gore and violence, Alien: Romulus is the most extreme example. And striking, proving in passing that it can be the headliner of a project of this magnitude and that it does not fear the shadow of Sigourney Weaver which hangs over the franchise, and which Noomi Rapace and Katherine Waterston have encountered before her.

Just like the film itself in relation to its predecessors, it does not seek to supplant the one with whom it all began, but rather to draw inspiration from it: “I really did everything I could to bring my character to life”she said to Total Film. “Watching Sigourney play that role, because she helped change everything just as much as those movies did.”

“I could never be her. But I put everything I had into this character, and tried to make it three-dimensional. As much as possible.” This is conveyed on screen by this mixture of fragility/sensitivity and strength, which she definitely masters. With a constant intensity, in the touching relationship between Rain and her brother Andy (David Jonsson Fray) as when it comes to taking up arms to fight a Xenomorph.

VISUAL

It's hard, at that moment, not to think of Ellen Ripley at the end of Aliens, but it's anything but a coincidence. And proof that Cailee Spaeny embodies the next generation. Without necessarily needing to stay in space: like every opus, Romulus closes its plot and leaves the possibility for its survivors to return, if it's a success.

Noomi Rapace and Katherine Waterston were not given the chance, and we will have to see in some time what happens to Cailee Spaeny, while director Fede Alvarez assures that he is not looking to make a trilogy.

Anger and an investigation on the agenda

But no matter, the actress will return in 2025 in two of the hottest projects of the moment: season 2 of the edgy series Acharnés, and Wake Up Dead Man, third episode of the Knives Out saga by Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig, about detective Benoît Blanc.

Two hype titles, and proof that Hollywood is rightly adopting Cailee Spaeny, a major revelation of this year's cinema, who knows how to confront icons (Elvis, Kirsten Dunst, the creature from Alien) and emerge stronger.