When Sigourney Weaver fell in love with a werewolf: “We walked around holding hands”
Sigourney Weaver is no stranger to slavering, murderous beasts accosting her at every turn. After all, she is best known as the star of the Alien franchise, and has tangled with more acid-blood-dripping Xenomorphs than any other actor in history. Hell, she’s also been possessed by a demon dog and nearly been eaten by a pink ooze-possessed bath in the Ghostbusters movies.
All this is to say, Weaver knows a thing or two about on-screen monsters. This was why director Drew Goddard and writer Josh Whedon were so excited to cast the iconic star in their 2012 meta comedy horror masterpiece The Cabin in the Woods. The movie was pitched as a riposte to the ‘torture porn’ genre that was so frustratingly prevalent at the time, and an attempt to simultaneously give a shot of “anything goes” adrenaline to the slasher genre.
Ultimately, though, Goddard and Whedon created a film that didn’t just reinvent slashers. Instead, it functioned as a self-aware referendum on the horror genre as a whole, poking fun at its various tropes and cliches in a manner so clever and exciting that gorehounds everywhere ate it up. Best of all, as the film barrelled through its remarkably original third act, peeling back the layers of artifice involved in its seemingly simple “teens are attacked by malevolent forces in a creepy cabin in the woods” conceit, the filmmakers had one more twist up their sleeves: Weaver.
Playing a character known only as ‘The Director,’ Weaver lends all her horror/creature feature bona fides to a film that, by its final moments, has featured all manner of horrifying beasties. From a grotesquely vicious Merman to a giant Dragonbat, and an enormous man-eating serpent to murderous Goblins, The Cabin in the Woods checks a hell of a lot of beasts off its list.
For Weaver, though, there was only one monster she had any interest in. To everyone’s surprise, her obsession with this hairy killer was not unlike Homer Simpson suggesting, “Whenever Poochie’s not on screen, all the other characters should be asking ‘Where’s Poochie?'” Instead of a cartoon dog, though, Weaver kept asking, “Where’s the werewolf?”
“I’ve never seen anyone more excited about working with a werewolf than Sigourney Weaver,” Goddard chuckled in the film’s ‘Making Of’ documentary. “She would ask every day, ‘Is the werewolf going to be here?’ ‘When is the werewolf showing up?’ ‘Can I please get a picture taken with the werewolf?!'”
Had Weaver shown any hint of her affinity for lycanthropy before she signed up for The Cabin in the Woods? Had she been secretly wanting to make a werewolf movie for her whole career? Did she simply have a love for the practical creature costumes and prosthetics involved in realising such a monster on-screen? Nobody knows, but it sure is funny.
As an extra wrinkle to this bizarre story, the stunt performer who squeezed himself into the werewolf costume for the film claimed on his Instagram page that Weaver wasn’t initially tickled pink to meet him. Instead, he suggested she was afraid of him in the whole getup, but he had a novel solution. “We walked around a little bit, holding hands, talking, and we became friends,” Richard Cetrone revealed. “Problem solved.” Hilariously, Cetrone added that, after one particular take of a werewolf attack scene, he heard someone behind the camera clapping and shouting, “Bravo!” It was Weaver, complete with a huge grin on her face. “It made me feel like I was doing theatre,” Cetrone laughed. “It was very cool.”
All in all, no one really knew why Weaver was so darn taken with that werewolf, but her enthusiasm for it became infectious to the entire cast and crew. It boosted everybody in their work and made the set an incredibly fun place to hang out. Most of all, though, Goddard noted, “It was so nice to see someone of her stature come in and just fit right in.”
