'Alien: Covenant' Spoiler Video: Guess Who's the First Facehugger Victim in the 'Alien' Universe?
Warning: This video and article contain big spoilers for Alien: Covenant.
With Alien: Covenant, Billy Crudup can officially say he’s made movie history. Thanks to the new timeline established by director Ridley Scott‘s Alien prequel series — which started with 2012’s Prometheus and continues in Covenant — Crudup is now the first crew member in the franchise’s universe to get attacked by a “facehugger.” That’s the term describing the Xenomorph when it is in its parasitic state, during which it attaches itself to a host’s face and implants a “chestburster” in the victim’s sternum. “I’ve been telling my son every day, ‘Daddy was the first,'” the actor jokes to Yahoo Movies. “There was lots of movies before, but I invented something!” (Watch our video interview above.)
Crudup inherits this honor from recently deceased actor John Hurt, who experienced the facehugger/chestburster combination in 1979’s Alien. But as Covenant — which is playing in theaters now — reveals, rogue android David (Michael Fassbender) has been tinkering with the alien evolution for years, and the facehugger eggs developed from his experiments. He decides to test his creation on the closest victim at hand: first mate Christopher Oram (Crudup). “That experience of watching the original with John Hurt creeping up on that thing in his mask is such a vivid part of my own childhood. When we shot that scene with the egg, the first take is me walking up to it, and going ‘No, I can’t do it. I know what happens if I look in there!'”
Read more from Yahoo Movies: