Statuesque, gorgeous and ripped, she’s a feminine icon you don’t want to mess with.

In person, though, curled up on her dressing room couch in a comfy pair of Uggs, Weaver is striking, of course, but not at all intimidating. Her angular face is softer off camera, and her deep, smoky voice is gentler than you might expect—especially when she’s speaking about friends and family. (The day before this interview, she dissolved into tears while shooting a video tribute for friend and Avatar producer Jon Landau, who died from cancer in 2024.) And she’s the first person to tell you she’s nothing like the formidable Ellen Ripley in Alien.

“I’m terribly shy,” admits Weaver during a break from shooting promos for the newly released Avatar: Fire and Ash, in which she reprises her 2022 The Way of Water role as the sensitive and spiritual Kiri. Indeed, beyond Weaver’s dressing room door sprawls the cavernous Hollywood soundstage where she shot the film—an otherworldly maze of Avatar paraphernalia: sleek motion-capture bodysuits, head-rig cameras and eerie rubber masks stippled with white reflective sensor thingamajigs.

“I think I’ve been successful playing strong women because I am vulnerable,” she continues. “I don’t try to pretend that I have the answers.”

When you ask how a self-confessed bashful, overly sensitive girl like her ended up a Hollywood star with a five-decade, blockbuster career and four franchises (Avatar, Alien, Ghostbusters and Marvel’s miniseries The Defenders), she seems genuinely baffled at the turns her life has taken.

“A working actor is always what I wanted to be,” she says. By “working actor” she means a stage actor, and not necessarily a famous one. “I like it when everyone puts on makeup in front of one cracked mirror, you know?” she says. “Four franchises was never a goal of mine.”

But whatever her protestations about how she got here, one thing slowly becomes clear as we talk and sift her life: Sigourney Weaver may not wear Ellen Ripley’s emotional armor, but beneath her grace and vulnerability lies the quiet tenacity of a warrior.

Born Susan Weaver in Manhattan—dad was NBC president Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, who created Your Show of Shows and the Today show, and mom was British actor Elizabeth Inglis (Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps)—the future actor had a ringside seat to the postwar entertainment boom.

Her early years were shaped by VIP jaunts to the TV studio (like a giddy on-set visit with Mary Martin as she taped Peter Pan) and regular trips to Radio City Music Hall. “I thought everyone’s family lived in show business,” she says with a laugh.

Not only did her parents pass along show business DNA, they also unwittingly trained young Susan for a future as a nomadic actor who drifts from set to set.

“We moved around a lot,” she recalls of life for her and her older brother, Trajan. “But my parents would never tell us we were moving. They would just say, ‘After school, come to this address.’ And we’d walk in and all our furniture would be in this completely different place. It was very destabilizing not to be able to say goodbye to a place where you’d spent a few years. I think they wanted to skip anything that might upset us, so they just pretended it didn’t happen.”

Entering her tweens, Weaver faced her first immovable obstacle: her height. By 12, she had reached 5-foot-11 and all the insecure awkwardness that goes with it. “I was like a big spider moving around, knocking things over,” she has said. “Being that tall made me want to disappear.”

She soon found ways to cope with her ungainly stature. One was by reinventing herself with a new name. (“I felt too tall to have a short name like Susie or Sue,” she has said.) She adopted “Sigourney” from a minor character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Another way she learned to navigate life’s ups and downs? Humor. “In my household, the most important talent in the world was to make people laugh,” she says, “and I knew I had that capacity—I was funny. I could make my father laugh. He would convulse with laughter, and tears would come out of his eyes.”

Her comic sensibility and new moniker followed her to Stanford, where she majored in English. She once recalled, “I did live in a tree house dressed like an elf.” She was also performing in commedia dell’arte and “doing Shakespeare all over the Bay Area in a covered wagon.”

After college, Weaver enrolled at Yale for drama, though her mother had tried to dissuade her, warning Weaver that she was too sensitive for such a cruel business: “Dear, they will eat you alive!” Professors at Yale were no more encouraging. “They told me I had no talent,” she says matter-​of-factly, “and that I’d never get anywhere.”

Weaver graduated from Yale in ’74 and returned home to New York with a new ferocity and a kind of anti-plan of attack. At auditions, the Yale profs’ put-downs ringing in her ears, “I thought, I’m never going to get it, so I’m going to go in and do what I want and not care at all what they’re looking for. I was reckless and fearless.”

It worked. Her first Broadway gig was as an understudy in Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife, starring screen legend Ingrid Bergman and directed by theater royalty Sir John Gielgud.

From there, she honed her comedic chops and inner goofiness with playwright and fellow Yalie pal Christopher Durang, acting in his 1976 sex farce, Titanic, and Das Lusitania Songspiel, a “crazy, intellectual joke” cowritten by Weaver, combining the styles of Stephen Sondheim, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

But even with a Woody Allen film as her screen debut—a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at the end of Annie Hall—Weaver says she wasn’t looking for fame on the big screen.

It was looking for her, though. Then up-and-coming British director Ridley Scott was searching for an unknown with a commanding presence for his 1979 fantasy-adventure, Alien.

A phone call from Warren Beatty, who’d seen Weaver perform off-Broadway, led to a meeting and a screen test. We all know what happened next: Alien became a worldwide phenomenon, propelling the 29-year-old Weaver to instant stardom and anointing her as cinema’s first true action heroine and a sci-fi icon.

“The writers took a male part and made it into Ripley,” she explains, “not because they felt it was a feminist statement but so, they said, ‘no one will ever think the girl might end up the survivor.’ When they rewrote it as a woman, they didn’t make her vulnerable, having little crying jags or any of that. She was just, ‘What’s next? Put one foot in front of another.’ ”

And that’s how Weaver has approached her career, crafting one of Hollywood’s most varied résumés—moving effortlessly between blockbusters, indie dramas, art house experiments and television films, while continuing to do theater along the way.

“I didn’t have some overriding plan,” she says. “But after doing a big film with all its demands and the waiting around, I’d long to do a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants small film, where you must get everything in one shot. It was like being on a seesaw. I had to do the opposite thing, always.”

It was while doing “the opposite thing”—summer stock theater in Williamstown, Massachusetts—that in 1983 Weaver met director Jim Simpson, who would become her husband the following year. “Jim is from Hawaii, one of five kids, and all of them have sunshine, aloha, in them,” she says. “He’s the least neurotic person I’ve ever met. He rides over things like waves, whereas I feel things strongly and go, ‘Oh, I’m in deep water.’ ”

She credits Simpson’s influence for keeping her grounded as her career soared. With Ghostbusters (1984), Working Girl (1988) and Gorillas (1988)—the latter two earning her Oscar nods for best supporting actress and best actress in the same year (she also got a best actress nom for the second film in the Alien franchise, 1986’s Aliens)—Weaver solidified her status as one of the biggest female stars of the ’80s.

Suddenly she wasn’t “the person who could sit on the bus and look at other people” anymore, she says.

The gangly girl who’d wanted to disappear was now a film star.

Her doubting Yale professors must have done a double take—as did her parents, her mother most of all. “She was ambivalent about my success,” says Weaver, a hint of regret in her voice. “It was not great for her to give up acting, but in those days, women did that—especially if they were married to someone like my father, who was running a whole world. She was astonished by my success, and it was sometimes very difficult for her.”

The actor surprised directors in a different way: by letting loose her outrageous, quirky humor. Auditioning for Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, Weaver startled him, she once recalled, when she began “to growl and bark and gnaw on the cushions.” Reitman cut the tape and said, “Don’t ever do that again.”

Shooting the 1999 cult classic Galaxy Quest, Weaver parodied the dizzy, buxom blond stereotype, dressed in a wig and enhanced breast padding. As costar Alan Rickman later recalled, she would return to her hotel at the end of a workday in full costume, just to enjoy people’s reactions.

With visionary director James Cameron, Weaver says, she found a cinematic soulmate. Like her father, the Avatar and Aliens director groks Weaver’s wry humor—“We make each other laugh,” she says—and intuits the awkward teen still lurking and aching within.

The first Avatar, in which Weaver played botanist Grace Augustine, came out in 2009 and became the world’s highest-grossing film of all time. For the second and third installments, Cameron created the role of Kiri, a 14-year-old Na’vi girl that Weaver portrayed in a motion-capture suit. “He told me, ‘You’re so immature. Nobody knows that, and you’ll be fine doing this.’ For better or worse, I feel a lot in common with Kiri,” she says.

The star has already signed on to do two more Avatar sequels, taking her up to 2031. She’s also considering bringing back Ellen Ripley for more space-creature killing—which would be her fifth turn in the role. “It’s very gratifying,” she says, “that this character has continued to represent things that are inspiring to people.”

Perhaps her greatest Hollywood superpower isn’t her high-flying and enduring career so much as her gift for sustaining a stable, private family life amid the industry’s chaos.

She and Simpson live in midtown Manhattan. Their only child—Charlotte, 35, an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University—and new son-in-law are in temporary residence. They dine on Simpson’s vegan specialties, catch movies and stroll through Central Park.

There’s no one like your child to remind you of who you really are. “Inside, I’m still that shy little person, and that’s never going to change. My family certainly knows that I’m not like Ripley,” Weaver says, laughing. “I’m very human.”

Her hometown also keeps her grounded, Weaver adds. “I love living in New York,” she says. “It’s the place I feel most sane. In Los Angeles, people are obsessed with the film business. In New York, everyone thinks that what they’re doing is the most important thing, and they all live together with their obsessions. I think it’s healthier.”

Despite her attachment to New York and family, the actor ventured to her mother’s homeland in the spring of 2024 for a personal milestone: her London stage debut. Her casting—as Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—was the firm and final answer to the doubts of long-ago naysayers, including a particularly dear one.

“I had to wait until my mother died to do theater in London,” she confesses. Once again, Weaver’s voice softens. “She would not have been in the front row cheering me on. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it.” (Weaver’s father died in 2002, and her mother, in 2007.)

But maybe, I suggest, her mother was with her in spirit?

“Kind of … a little bit,” she says, recalling some of the magic she felt when she arrived in London’s West End. Film and TV may have made her career, but the theater? “That’s my home,” she says. “When I got to the star’s dressing room, I felt like the theater gods had wanted me to come, as if they were saying, ‘You’ve earned the right to be here. We’ve always been on your side. I’m glad we can tell you now.’ ”