Although Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is very much an ensemble piece, her Dr. Elizabeth Shaw is very much the central character as it’s her desire to find answers to where we came from that sends her and a crew of 17 on the exploration vessel Prometheus into the furthest reaches of space to answer an invitation found on ancient cave paintings.
ShockTillYouDrop attended the London junket for the movie and sat in on a roundtable with the actress alongside some of the internet’s crack journalists to hear her talk about working with Ridley and the influence of the original Alien‘s leading lady, Sigourney Weaver, among other things.
(You can read our previous interviews with Charlize Theron and Michael Fassbender, and look for video interviews with all three later in the week.)
Q: How does it feel to finally be able to talk about a movie that’s been shrouded in secrecy up until now?
And as before, here’s a more spoilery qestion and answer, which we recommend reading only AFTER seeing the movie.
SPOILERS BELOW!
Q: There’s one scene in particular that I think everyone’s going to be talking about, so were you dreading shooting that really terrifying scene.
Rapace: I was a mess. I was dreaming really crazy disturbed dreams. I remember I dreamt that I woke up and I was touching my tummy and something was moving, and I saw something kind of coming out. I was like, “Oh my God. This can’t be happening, I have to call someone, I better call Ridley.” That was in my dream, and then I really woke up and I realized that it was just a dream and I was sweating, I was a mess. I felt so feverish. I’m losing it. And then I came that same morning, and I said to Ridley, “This is really getting into my head and my body,” and he said “Great. Okay, should we start?” But that whole sequence, I think we were kind of working on that sequence with me running around for four days or something, and he was quite tough and really kind of affected me a lot. What was amazing, in a weird way, was to do it with Ridley, because he felt that he was so much in it with me. I never thought about that I was a woman, half-naked, in front of him as a man. It felt like he was breathing, living, thinking the character with me, inside her. I think that Elizabeth Shaw is probably a little bit of Ridley too, because she’s sort of like the heart in the movie, the dreamer, the believer, and he is also that. It felt like even in the most kind of disturbed, crazy, extreme moments in the movie, I never felt alone. I always felt like we were sharing it together somehow, and he has this very dry humor, and he always came in like “Did that hurt?” “No, of course not.” He was like “Great, so you ready for another one?” I was like “Yes,” because I was like “I’m not going to show him, I’m not going to show him how much I hurt myself.” So I love working with him.
